In music, a concept album is an album that is "unified by a theme, which can be instrumental, compositional, narrative, or lyrical." Commonly, concept albums tend to incorporate preconceived musical or lyrical ideas rather than being improvised or composed in the studio, with all songs contributing to a single overall theme or unified story. This is in contrast to the practice of an artist or group releasing an album consisting of a number of unconnected (lyrically or otherwise) songs performed by the artist.

Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads (1940) is considered to be the first concept album. Before the advent of rock and roll, concept albums had their original heyday in jazz of the early to mid '50s with artists such as Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra, the latter of whom would record numerous concept albums for Capitol throughout the last half of the '50s such as In the Wee Small Hours, Come Fly with Me, Where Are You? and Nice 'n' Easy. In the late fifties Johnny Cash recorded songs for his first two concept albums, Songs of Our Soil and Ride This Train, in which were released in 1959 and 1960 respectively.

Original Concept were an 80s hip hop group from Long Island, New York, arguably best known for their single, “Can You Feel It.” They only made one album and it was notable for the absence of lyrics on many of the tracks. The group are perhaps better known for their production prowess and instrumentals than anything else.

In the early 1980s, a group of young men at WBAU FM formed a group called the "Concept Crew." Their show “The Operating Room” was broadcast on Monday nights from Adelphi University on the same station which featured the Spectrum City DJs (Chuck D and Flavor Flav) who later went on to form Public Enemy. The members were Doctor Dré, T-Money, Rapper G, Easy G and Wildman Steve. By 1986, the group began calling themselves Original Concept and had released their first record, "Knowledge Me" in February of that year. The B-Side of "Knowledge Me" went on to become their first single, "Can You Feel It." The single has since gone on to become one of the most sampled source records in hip-hop music.