The major labels were actively trying to kill vinyl in the late 80s / early 90s - so it was a way to save costs for record stores (and encourage the replacement) while not making them upgrade their shelves.B wrote:Why was that even a thing? Did they fit better into bins made for records? No wait, we were buying cassettes before that, weren't we?
It was mainly the cardboard longbox, but a few labels used plastic clamshells that had the CD booklet up top and the CD case down below. The cardboard longbox sometimes itself was just a generic cardboard box with a window cut out so you could see the front and back of the disc, especially for older catalog re-issues.
A handful of bands (read: R.E.M.) complained about the waste. There was a brief period where they made CD cases that would fold down or transform from a longbox shape to a standard CD case after you opened it. (The first Vs. pressings came in one of those, though I only ever saw copies that were sealed in their CD case shape.)
The majors (mostly) eliminated all of that by the end of 1993. The hard plastic ones that stores used later did the same thing in a reusable way, but some of them came with the bonus of having embedded security tags.
I still have my longboxes from that era. I kept thinking I might frame some of them, since the artwork is often different and interesting, but they're usually nowhere near as cool as the vinyl artwork.
Btw - the bane of the 90s was the "tamper-proof" holographic sticker on the opening side of the CD case that you couldn't really remove without leaving the holographic gunk side of the sticker behind. (The copies of Vs. I bought on release day had the eco-pack and that fucking sticker.)
