Let's Meditate on the Jewel Case

It is one of the great things about the digital/downloading age - that the music does not have to be bound by format or packaging conventions in this way. yes some people do like that aspect of it for various reasons but my point is that you have the choice now. same with video of course.

CDs, etc, all are packed into jewel cases via machinery, which load thm into boxes, ship them to Asda, and rack job them like so.

Have you ever owned one that wasn't?

I quite like jewel cases, actually. I like the fact that they can die and you can get new ones. A new jewel case kind of resurrects the music within it, a nice clear "lid" with no scratches helps you see the cover better, makes you more likely to want to play it. Makes me more likely anyway. As long as the paper sleeve and the CD itself stay in good condition, you can replace jewel cases indefinitely, making an album immortal. I like that.

Also, they stack and shelve well.

how has your vinyl coped? assuming you have some.

you can replace jewel cases indefinitely

IT'S A SCAM to get your precious quids.

Although I need to buy a load of new plain record sleeves for many of my drowned-but-resuscitated old 12"s.

ihttp://www.wfmu.org/MACrec/images/cbB.jpg

http://www.spectroscopynow.com/FCKeditor/UserFiles/Image/spectroscopyNOW_ezines_2005/Journal_Articles/old_person_thinking_200011105.jpg

http://www.hsus.org/web-files/home/281x144_cat_carrier.jpg

Dan't comment brings up another question. After 20+ years doesn't it seem like the problem of broken spiders might have been solved?

I just really like designing artwork for the clear jewel cases. Please see all of the Acute CDs for examples of trying to make sure the back of the booklet, the front of the traycard and the CD itself make for something nice when you open the CD case itself.

I haven't been buying vinyl for as long as CD's (just the last four or so years), but I haven't had any problems- vinyl seems to be much more resilient (so long as it's kept clean) and the paper inner sleeves are adequate protection.

http://991.com/newgallery/Franz-Ferdinand-You-Could-Have-It-345754.jpg

Is it like the case the special edition of the last Depeche Mode album comes in?

i like it, it turns my CDs into tiny LPs.

I would not consider myself especially materialistic... but that kind of behaviour is beyond the pale. Cheap CD wallets also tend to scratch the discs!

"super" jewel cases UGH. I don't know why they look so wrong to me, I didn't like the roundy edged cassette versions either when they started coming in (which dates me!). If they are rolling those out for everything... I'll to switch to mpfucking3 for life.

I like the idea of vahid's system, but I haven't looked into what's out there as far as nice sleeves that separate all the materials and don't leave your fingernails catching on all the bits & pieces whilst fiddling to get the disc out.

Kind of amazed they stayed 85% sucky for SO long though.

I'm assuming you're in the UK? All the Can remasters I've bought (Mute US versions) have been in standard jewel cases...

I hate back covers that don't have track numbers, especially if the names are arranged in some artsy format that makes them hard to count.

Oh yes. FSOL, Dead Cities, WHY GOD WHY

Other peoples houses sometimes scare me.

If you love films you get, at the least, a widescreen TV, right?

lol

Pretty much every other CD packaging format sucks. Digipacks? Paper sleeves? Garbage.

This seems to be what most radio stations do, and yeah, it's wonderfully LP-like -- you just have to be sure you keep them alphabetical so you can find everything. They do make nice little fold-over sleeves specifically for this purpose, with room for the front and back inserts, and a soft cloth-like part for the disc to rest against.

I love people who say they love music and yet treat their CDs like shit

Hahaha I love Popeye's fried chicken, but I don't worry too much about ripping the box when I open it!

esp i they're modified or colored and irreplaceable

LPs are all about object fetish. They're special. Beautiful. Delicate. Even rare. From their inception, they've been marketed to "sophisticated" audiophiles as important collector's items requiring special care. Every aspect of the LP can be lovingly fetishized, down to the sexy shrink-wrap sheath that encases it, fetchingly adorned with price tags and other romantic stickerings.

CDs, like cassettes before them, deny this will-to-fetish. Although jewel cases are no longer all basic black, most of them still seem disposable - unrelated to the "real" object they contain. We're forced to remove nasty security stickers as we open them, and as we open them, they often break. We can replace them at the drop of a hat with something identical, or even better. All this invites us to view the package as a mere obstruction to the meaningful object-content within. But the object-content, when removed from the jewel case, doesn't hang together as the beloved. It's just a tiny, shiny disc with a few flimsy inserts. Thus the disposability of the standard jewel case draws a very clear demarcation between the secondary physical content and the real content, which is reduced to the music itself.

The jewel case is a triumph of Ikea aesthetics: it's functional, cheap, short-lived, quietly attractive in a modernist sense, and ultimately disposable. It argues that things derive the quality of niceness primarily from functionality, and to some extent from newness and uniformity.

At the same time, the music that CDs deliver has been almost entirely devalued by file sharing and easy ripping/burning. We no longer need CDs. We can get the music anywhere. And we can carry thousands of records around in our pockets.

So, what's left? The package is cheap junk, and the music can be had without even bothering to buy a CD in the first place. There's no there there anymore. No wonder sales are down...

This guy has got it covered.

I also don't really agree with the non-fetish idea regarding CDs...some jewelcases are so well designed that they are part of the art for me, and more often, non-jewel cases, like IPR or Fireproof press or whatever various types of envelopes I've gotten CDs in with bits glued to them here and there, totally fetish art objects.

But whatever, I buy CDs, rip them to my computer and never look at them again. Within a few years, EVERYONE will just be downloading music, legally or not, and CDs will be history.

LPs didn't use to be fetishized. The fact that they seem to be now is because of their CD-induced rarity. CDs were fetishized in the early days, I mean the case is called a jewel case ferchrissakes. It's not a jewel, it's just another copy of some music!

One good thing about the jewel case that no one's mentioned yet is that on a shelf you can read the title without having to take the disk out, which isn't always so easy on a digipak and impossible on a simple sleeve. My only problem with them is the brittle plastic they use.

ihttp://www.brainwashed.com/brain/images/peaceorchestra.jpg

And if you remove the booklet from the jewel case:

ihttp://ec3.images-amazon.com/images/P/B00000K53L.01._AA240_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

http://www.brainwashed.com/brain/images/peaceorchestra.jpg

to

http://ec3.images-amazon.com/images/P/B00000K53L.01._AA240_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

OTM. I came of musical age in the tape "era" if there was such a thing, and, even though I did go through a jazz phase around age 12 which more or less convinced me of the sonic differences, vinyl got cemented in my mind as "that dusty thing they hardly sell anywhere that I can only play on the living room player with my parents a room away who keep telling me to turn it down -- not in my room, not in the car, not at the beach or a picnic". This quaint anti-utility seems to engender a fetishism in some that I'm pretty immune to. With tapes as my norm, cds struck me as a slicker whiz-bang! variation on the theme with greater sound that I was used to and I've carried that impression since, and hence I'll probably be loyal to the format beyond all common sense(like I was with tapes if you can believe that--stopped buying for good c. '95).

Dude, you shoulda sprung for a cassette deck to go with the record player. It would've been a whole different world for you. All those beautiful records on cassette! Take 'em anywhere! Best of both worlds etc!

Confession: I was record collector scum in the pre-CD era.

aesthetically to me, rounded edges = desperate to be a bit "modern", square edges = neutral & ignorable.

In the new world, however, the sound has no intrinsic value. The new world is profoundly democratic and fair. Any sound can be endlessly duplicated with no loss of quality. Almost any file can be destroyed without threatening the life of the sound it contains. And almost anything from anywhere can be heard at any time by anyone. If everyone had a personal gnome that could poop out diamonds on command, how much would diamonds be worth? How much are letters or numbers worth?

Music may be valuable to us, personally, in the moment that we interact with it, but it can never be lost, and time will never wear it smooth. We can have the sound or not, as the moment suits us, and rest secure in the fact that the sound will be there for us, tomorrow or 20 years from now. The sound is now like air. And it isn't worth a thing.

I mean, it sounds like you're a little peeved that music has lost that value, but my guess would be that music-as-commidty is a fairly recent invention, and the move to easily-shared/copied digital music is like reverting to a time when you just needed a piano and some sheet music (and someone who played piano or lute or whatever) to share/copy a given piece of music. Obviously, music had a value insofar as a person would pay a given amount to go to the symphony or an opera, but we still have live performances. To a large extent, people are growing up (myself, at 21, included) in an era where free music is taken for granted--like music is a right thate every person is owed instead of a saleable object that any person can own--and the music industry will have to adapt.

And without air, we die. Many of us breathe in music like air every day, and while we wouldn't die without it, quality of life would certainly feel like it's taken a dive.

I like Max's idea that music is returning to a natural state -- like we're recovering from the blip in history -- the 20th century, when the flow of music was controlled by businessmen and the media -- labels, merchants, radio, television. Only the wealthy and obsessives had full access to all the music they could desire. Now that we're free of that tyranny, everyone can have that privilege, and music will survive and evolve, and continue to make a living by performing.

Funny that this thread is about plastic cases. I just returned from Arizona, visiting my mother. She had a few of my old albums -- Queen, J. Geils Band. One thing that bugged me was the sleeves would always split open on the sides, so I had to repair all three sides with scotch tape, which is now brittle and yellowed. No matter how new or clean the records were, they sounded like crap on the cheap record player and worn-out needle we couldn't afford to replace when I was growing up. The double cassette deck boombox I bought at 15 was a revelation -- the slight hiss was way preferable to the pops and clicks, and I was able to make mix tapes from radio, tapes and records, and expand my collection at a fraction of the cost. When I got my college radio show, I'd stay up half the night in the studio taping albums, filling the hungry void with the music I craved growing up but had no access to. Tapes were awesome. CDs were pricey but sounded brilliant even through my box. I reserved those purchases for special, classic albums. My first three I ever bought were Joy Division - Substance, The Pixies - Surfer Rosa, and Sonic Youth - Daydream Nation (the day it was released). CDs are still far more reliable storage than hard drives, 100% of which will fail eventually, and they look pretty on my hand built shelves. To hell with vinyl fetishists, CDs and their tacky jewel cases kick ass.

I'm not at all troubled by the fact that music is losing its commidity/scarcity value, and I agree that the large-scale commodification of sounds is primarily a 20th century phenomenon. The devaluation of intellectual property in the digital age is simply an artifact of progress - neither intrinsically good nor bad. And when it comes to issues such as this, I tend to side with the futurists by default. That said, I'm not immune to the charms of nostalgia. I have a rather mawkish fondness for the sense of loss, which perhaps translates as peevishness.

***

Fastnbulbous: OTM. Even as a vinyl fetishist, OTM.

But I do think there are some class issues embedded in those old debates of vinyl vs. digital. I didn't meet a single person until I got to college who had the resources to afford a stereo that cost more than a hundred bucks and a collection of more than a hundred albums. The closest I found was a couple crates of records a friend's older brother brought home from college - goldmine! I totally invited myself over to sit in the basement and fill a couple dozen tapes, heh.

When CDs were first introduced they cost significantly more than LPs, and the players cost more than a turntable as well. It was the CD users that were the upper crust, nose in the air types, not the grubby vinyl masses. It's only the dominance of the CD medium that has driven LP prices up and made them symbolic of elitism.

I'm not a vinyl snob by any means; I can't imagine ever buying new vinyl now, and I only buy used if it's really cheap and it's something I don't really yearn for (last purchase was 2 Mick Ronson LPs for $1-2 each a year ago). I still have hundreds of LPs from my youth so I have a turntable ($20 at a thrift store, but with a new cartridge) front and center on my stereo.

Also, I think a lot of the vinyl snobbery comes from the horrendous CD mastering done on many disks in the early years (Kind Of Blue, I'm looking at you!)

I think there was an era where both (combined with cost of players and lack of car players) were neglected by the masses for tapes. Like 1988-1992?

Nomad-I Wanna Give You Devotion
Arrested Developement-Tennessee
808 State-Cubik
Enigma-Sadeness Pt. whatever

I'm sure there were others. They came in those shitty cardboard tube sleeves...who's fetishizing those?

Yeah, that sounds about right. CDs and players were still too expensive for most, and the portability of tape was a big factor. I couldn't see why anyone would buy a pre-recorded cassette, though, because the sound was so bad. For close to the same money you could buy the LP and a blank tape and make a much better copy.

http://www.all-pictures-photos.com/images/jewel-kilcher/jewel-kilcher-007-img.jpg

ha ha, looking back these were pretty smart. you already had enough plastic housing the tape. i ended up keeping half my tapes out of their covers and in shoeboxes anyway, mixed with loads of TDK blanks for radio and/or vinyl recording. didn't have a CD player until '94.