Longbox Alternatives

The 80’s and early 90’s glorified consumer products with an overabundance of useless packaging. The compact disc is perhaps the finest example.

CD’s used to come packed in 12-inch cardboard exteriors known as Longboxes. This excessive packaging was eventually phased out by 1993 due to environmental concerns, but it was always a visual treat when shopping for music the same as flipping through vinyl jackets. Plus, they have become quite collectible and add value to the dying CD format in the digital age of music downloads.

Check out these longboxes for Dinosaur Jr.’s “Where You Been,” Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Blood Sugar Sex Magik” compared to the CD jacket covers. Each uniquely redistribute the album art in the vertical format.

“Where You Been” simply crops the art and centers the band logo. You don’t get to see the roadkill off to the left. The back does the same cropping with one of the inner CD jacket images.

“Nevermind” places the art in the same size ratio as the CD jacket, but they extract the band logo and album title – a very common thing also done on certain cassette tape covers (which was also a vertical format). This longbox also exaggerates the green, underwater light reflection images, and a blurry photo of the band is featured on the back instead of the famous monkey photo.

“Blood Sugar Sex Magik” doubles the CD jacket cover in the same size ration with an added boarder at the top and the bottom. The unique thing about this doubling is that I believe it’s the only time you could see the album cover without the permanent intruding Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics label. The back of the longbox also features a sign up form for Rock The Vote, emphasizing the dispensable nature of the cardboard exterior.

These three classic albums still hold their own as MP3’s with zero packaging, but they certainly stand tall in their original longboxes!