Cheap Thrills is the second studio album by American rock band Big Brother and the Holding Company, released on August 12, 1968 by Columbia Records.

Producer John Simon incorporated recordings of crowd noises to give the impression of a live album, for which it was subsequently mistaken by many listeners.

Cheap Thrills was a critical and commercial success, reaching number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart for eight nonconsecutive weeks in 1968.

Columbia Records art director John Berg said, "[Janis] Joplin commissioned it, and she delivered Cheap Thrills to me personally in the office.

[8] Cheap Thrills was released in the summer of 1968, one year after Big Brother's debut album, and reached number one on the Billboard Top LPs chart in its eighth week in October.

The 1999 rerelease of Cheap Thrills features the outtakes "Flower in the Sun" and "Roadblock" as well as live performances of "Magic of Love" and "Catch Me Daddy" as bonus material.

"[15] Robert Christgau was more enthusiastic in his column for Esquire and called it Big Brother's "first physically respectable effort", as it "not only gets Janis's voice down, it also does justice to her always-underrated and ever-improving musicians.

[17] In a retrospective review in the 2000s, AllMusic's William Ruhlmann hailed Cheap Thrills as Joplin's "greatest moment" and said it sounds like "a musical time capsule [today] and remains a showcase for one of rock's most distinctive singers.

[21] On March 22, 2013, the album was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and was thus preserved into the National Recording Registry for the 2012 register.