How much did The Beatles' 'White Album' cost upon release?

The Beatles - The White Album - 1968

(Credits: Far Out / The Beatles / Apple Corps LTD)

Sat 27 September 2025 21:30, UK

Recently, King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard migrated all of their music to the humble music website Bandcamp, where fans can buy their records at a price they wish.

Putting trust back into the music fan and taking power away from the tech-obsessed oligarchs, they sought to change the narrative about music consumption. Because, for the last decade at least, it’s been all about slimming the costs.

Take Spotify, for example. For less than the price of a modern McDonald’s order, you can gain access to an unlimited bank of music. It’s created a narrative towards music and, more generally, art, where the masses consider it to be devoid of any cost at all. Long gone are the days when you would carefully save your pennies before heading to a record store to deliberate on which album would be the beneficiary of your hard-earned money.

As such, gone are the days when we arguably treasure one record the way we should, where we get to know every sonic corner of it because we didn’t have the option to turn it off halfway through and play something else. Without harping on about the good old days, there is a serious infection in the way we consume art, and streaming is at the very heart of it.

Ask yourselves just how a band like The Beatles would fare in the modern, digitalised world. Would the storytelling beauty of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band have woven itself into the consciousness of society, had that society had the option to flick it off and start browsing Netflix instead?

But rather luckily for them, and let’s face it, us, The Beatles’ career wasn’t subjected to the grim reality of streaming, and so they could price their records as they saw fit. And in 1968, with the release of their biggest record to date, The White Album, they decided to raise the stakes. The album was priced at 3.13 shillings ($8.76), which, according to the Bank of England inflation calculator, roughly equates to £45 in new money. Still, the record spent eight weeks as the UK number one album and proved that despite the price, there was a healthy appetite for great music.

Why is vinyl so expensive?

Well at £45 a vinyl in 1968, talk on modern day inflation seems to be negated. However, come 1968, The Beatles were undoubtedly the premier band in the world and with The White Album being a double album, the cost of two records in the sleeve would have undoubtedly forced the price.

But the vinyl format has always been an expensive medium, which is why the sound quality is always better. It’s got a high-quality raw material profile, and so the manufacturing costs for it are reasonably high, including specialised equipment and labour-intensive processes for creating records. In the modern age, that has inflated due to a shortage of pressing plants, resulting in small, independently run labels and manufacturers to press vinyl, which, when catering to a musical landscape that is more densely populated than ever before, simply makes the process incredibly taxing and thus charged at a serious premium.

How much did The Beatles’ ‘White Album’ cost upon release?

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