If any of you have gone down the “lo-fi YouTube minimal house” rabbit hole like I have, you will no doubt find many house artists use the motif of circular album art. Personally I love it, it lets me know exactly the kind of music I’m about to listen to. Some examples:
How did this trend start? I assume it has to do with vinyl but was wondering if anyone had additional details.
Also use this thread to share some of your fav YouTube lofi tunes 
Ah yes, the circular lo-fi house album art thing. No idea where it came from but I’m a fan of some related genres (Rominimal is pretty swag). It’s super fun to produce and decent background music for working to. Props for mentioning Sweely by the way, his music got me into making this sort of stuff.
There’s a fad for using pics for pretty girls in washed out photographs in circles:
As well as racing cars:
There’s also a love of pics of old American diners and malls (extra points for a racing car as well):
The aesthetic is playing on the nostalgia trip, a longing for memories contained within Polaroids, ghosts of our recent past, revenants of a past age. It’s reminiscent of Derrida’s ‘hauntology’ which was explored more recently by Mark Fischer in his titular book.
In terms of the music, it’s all fairly basic 909 samples, minor 7 chords and funky basslines processed with loads of tape saturation. The noise that builds up gives the listener a sound bath, like TV static, which may be why it’s so relaxing.
You have amazing taste! All good tunes above.
Right back at ya!
For those interested, a superb, funny and efficient wee video on making music in this genre is this one:
It’s the best kind of house here are two of mine for those of you into this circular album art minimal house stuff 
Vibes
I don’t have any proof or anything to back this up other than I buy a ton of records, but I think it’s pretty much this. A lot of electronic genres released on vinyl are pressed in the 12" format, as opposed to LPs. 12"s have wider spacing between the grooves which allows the ability to make louder records with improved dynamics and audio quality, making them better for DJing. The trade-off is that more spaced out grooves means you don’t have as much space for songs, which is why 12" records usually only have three to five tracks on them.
Most 12" singles/EPs on vinyl rarely have custom outer jackets, let alone album art. If there’s any art at all it’s going to printed on the center label, which I’m assuming is where the circle convention comes from.
As to why, this next part is speculation because I’m only a consumer, not a producer of these things, but I’m assuming in order to keep costs and prices down, since these records are produced by small labels in limited numbers for niche purposes and only contain a few tracks, that’s why they forego full jackets with printed album art. Some labels ditch jackets all together and only put out releases in paper or cardstock sleeves.
Your speculation is correct.
Reminds me of the old Schultze/Namlook Dark Side of the Moog series