Manufacturers Square Off Over CD Packaging

ALBANY, N.Y. - The music industry has agreed that the "long box," the cardboard sleeve in which compact discs are packaged, is environmentally incorrect and must be replaced.

But when it comes to deciding what will house the more than 300 million CDs sold each year, the industry vastly disagrees.

Squaring off to replace the long box are the Eco-Pak, the Digi-Trak and the jewel box - names as foreign to music listeners today as the CD itself was a decade ago.

So far, there's been a mad scramble of competing interests. People who actually buy the music largely have been bypassed, something that critics say could haunt an industry that once tried to pass reel-to-reel tapes on to the public.

"Let's remember the `new Coke' and not enter into this brave new world of CD packaging blindly," Billboard said in a recent editorial.

The Ban the Box movement began around Earth Day 1990. Environmentalists objected to the waste involved in the cardboard packaging invented so compact discs could fit in music store bins once reserved for albums. When consumers buy the music, the cardboard is torn off and discarded.

When the cause was taken up by rock stars such as Sting, R.E.M. and the Grateful Dead, legislators in several states considered proposals to ban the box. Industry officials decided late last year that the long box's days were numbered.

At first blush, simply selling the discs in the plastic jewel box would seem to make the most sense. That's how discs are sold all over the world except the United States, where consumers are left with the plastic box after they tear off the cardboard box.

But the jewel box is the underdog because retailers worry that shoplifters will make the boxes easy targets, and they don't want to spend money to build new display cases.

Industry insiders say the cold shoulder given to Peter Gabriel's recent greatest hits CD, released at the artist's insistence only in a jewel box, reinforced that view. Some music retailers simply refused to stock it.

"The jewel box doesn't fly in the U.S. market," said Paul Smith, president of Sony Music Distribution. "It never will."

The Digi-Trak is a mostly cardboard display shaped like the traditional long box that can be folded into a device the size of the jewel box. Many consumers were introduced to it on Sting's new album.

The Eco-Pak is similar but sturdier. It has a mostly plastic tray that locks into position after a consumer opens it, with cardboard folding over as the cover.

The music-industry conglomerate WEA (Warners, Elektra, Atlantic), which is responsible for about 40 percent of the recorded music to make it onto the market, said a few months ago that all of its CDs would be released in the Eco-Pak starting next year. The Eco-Pak is made by the Ivy Hill Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of WEA.

That's made the Eco-Pak the early favorite.

"The logic of the Eco-Pak really appeals to most of the spokes of the wheel that make the industry happen," said Floyd Glinert, head of the Entertainment Packaging Association. That's a trade group of cardboard manufacturers that would help produce the Eco-Pak if it's widely accepted by the industry.

Sensing Eco-Pak's early lead, plastics industry officials, who stand to lose business if the jewel box is abandoned, have formed their own lobbying group. The Jewel Box Advocates and Manufacturers, or JAM, has begun an advertising campaign warning against trashing the jewel box.

JAM says it doesn't believe the industry will adopt a new format without actually testing to see if consumers like it.

"I'm hoping that the industry can get together to give the consumer the best package," said Scott Sanderude, a Dow Plastics marketing manager who's head of JAM. "We're willing to do the testing to see what that is. The testing we've done says that's the jewel box."

According to JAM surveys, consumers say that the cardboard packages are too flimsy and confusing, Sanderude said.

Arthur Kern, executive vice president of Ivy Hill, declared JAM's survey "self-serving." But he acknowledged that only industry people have actually seen the Eco-Pak and it's yet to pass a consumer test.

"Everyone who has seen the package absolutely loves it," he said. "I'm not the slightest bit nervous at all."

Kern claims that the Eco-Pak will bring back colorful album graphics, a rock 'n' roll tradition lost with the onset of the "sterile" jewel box.

In fact, Eco-Pak supporters grow misty-eyed when talking about the old album days. Listen to Martin Folkman, the former Ban the Box spokesman who now represents Glinert's group:

"It's a relationship that you have with it. The album has a personality. It's not just the music. I can't imagine the Beatles' `White Album' as anything but the `White Album.' You just don't have the same feeling with CDs. Plastic. It's cold. The booklet isn't any kind of relationship."

Along with conflict and romance, this story has intrigue.

A new package joined the sweepstakes in May. Produced by a Brooklyn resident named David Cowan, it's said to incorporate more plastic than the Eco-Pak and Digi-Trak and is more popular with JAM.

Just don't ask Cowan to describe his invention.

"My attorneys have asked me to keep it quiet," said Cowan, who's waiting for a patent.

A series of consumer tests that WEA is scheduling this summer will go a long way toward settling the battle. Industry officials expect that if consumers like the Eco-Pak, other record companies will fall in line behind WEA. If they don't, it's open season again.