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The Knockoff*Project II
Album cover spoofs, goofs, tributes, send-ups, near misses and happy coincidences.
I built this site back in the early aughts. It catalogued album covers that lifted their look from other album covers — parodies, tributes, imitations, flat-out copies. It was a Yahoo Pick. Wired wrote about it. I maintained it for a while, then let it languish. But I never stopped shopping for records, and I never stopped seeing things that should have been on here.
After more than a decade of that, I rebuilt it — with a lot of help from AI. Same obsession, considerably more knockoffs, and covers finally big enough to actually see. There are sections now: a Beatles wing, a Soundtracks room, a spot where all the sexy ones live together, and a new category we had to invent — Coincidences, for covers that share a source image without having copied each other. Flip through by artist like you're at the record store, or just scroll. Enjoy.
Yahoo Pick, June 22, 2003. Written up in Wired. Somehow still here. You can still poke around The Knockoff*Project debut release (2001).
West Seattle-based designer Peter Hilgendorf first launched this site back in 2001, while working as a designer for the original Amazon.com Music store — picture the halls lined floor-to-ceiling with CD covers. His studio, Lake & Pine Creative Studio, just had the World Premiere of its documentary RADIOHEART: The Drive & Times of DJ Kevin Cole, and has contributed motion design and animation to The Little Feat Movie. The studio has also produced music videos for The Replacements, Little Feat, The Doors, Downpilot, and Alcohol Funnycar — see more. Find him at @plimsoul on Discogs and @peterhilgendorf on Instagram.
What Are We Missing?
Know of one that should be here? Tell us about it — paste a Discogs link, upload a cover, or just describe it. Anything works.
A note of thanks
A big chunk of the newly appearing Knockoffs exist because of the amazing work of Discogs user tusovski. Their lists, like ones in the original Knockoff*Project, are a clear labor of love and scholarship and obsession.
The same goes for the lovingly kept lists of PabloPlato, herbyesterday, TwinPowerForce, ksdfjsldfj and FredKiller — fellow travelers in the same obsession.
FAQ
A "knockoff"? Some of these are a stretch.
We use the word with some artistic license. If it's close enough to make you do a double-take, it's in.
What's the difference between a knockoff and a coincidence?
A knockoff borrowed from something. A coincidence is when two covers independently landed on the same photograph, model, or piece of public domain art — nobody copied anybody. We find those just as interesting.
The images used to be tiny. What happened?
For years they were 150-pixel thumbnails — bandwidth was precious and that's just how it was. They're finally big now.
Can I hear or buy any of these?
Yes — at long last. Look for the Listen and Discogs links on each cover. (The old FAQ promised "I'm working on a script to make them buyable from Amazon. This will take time." It took… a while.)
I submitted one and don't see it.
Updates are infrequent, loving, and deeply irregular. It'll get there.
© 2026 Lake & Pine Creative Studio. A catalog of other people's ideas, legally protected by the concept of irony.
