Think inside the box

Downloading is fine most of the time, but at Christmas, we want to give proper presents. A deluxe CD package fits the bill – and they’re enjoying a renaissance

On iTunes, you pay £7.99 for a new album. At a store, you can pay at least a fiver more for a skimpy booklet in a flimsy jewel case – not a compelling argument for going to the high street. Yet for the increasingly beleaguered record industry, the weeks leading up to Christmas are essential for a healthy bottom line. This is the time when people want to buy physical presents. But do today’s download kids value packaging? While Radiohead are being coy about who paid what to download In Rainbows, they appear to have sold more than 100,000 copies of the de luxe box set at £40 a pop.

Older readers may recall the golden age of the album sleeve: how, for example, the Stones’s Warhol-designed Sticky Fingers came with a real working zip, the original Glastonbury triple-album cover could be turned into a pyramid, and Roger Dean’s artwork for Yes, and Storm Thorgerson’s for Pink Floyd, were essential to those groups’ images.

With the arrival of the CD, cover art was scaled down, but it doesn’t have to be that way. “When we were recording the Buena Vista Social Club album in Havana, we knew something special was going down on tape,” recalls Nick Gold, owner of World Circuit. “We went through three design companies to get the cover right, because we wanted something that would catch the imagination.” If the music of those wonderful old men was unique, so was the album package, with a 48-page booklet of photos, biographies and lyrics in Spanish and English. The booklet was so thick, it had to be placed outside the jewel case, inside a larger-than-average cardboard slip case. It had weight and texture – it begged to be owned.

BVSC has sold more than 7m copies. It still comes in the original packaging, which costs almost four times more than the average major-label release to produce. All subsequent World Circuit releases have come in a slip case, with whatever booklets and photography they require. “A slip case makes a real difference to the feel,” Gold says. “We are trying to make something we’d like to own.”

David Gorman, of the Los Angeles label HackTone, insists: “There is always more to being a fan than just the music, and the package should still be part of that.” HackTone staff call themselves “musical revisionaries, who rescue albums unjustly languishing in obscurity”. The Salvation Blues, by Mark Olson, is a joy to hold (the songs are great, too). After his marital break-up, the former Jayhawk spent a year travelling in Europe, chronicling his journey from despair to redemp-tion. The cover, a four-colour dust jacket with sleeve notes, opens like a hardback travel book.

The reissue of Arthur Alexander’s 1993 album is a lovingly presented portfolio of essential memorabilia. Alexander was a country-soul singer and songwriter in the early 1960s, whose work inspired the Stones and the Beatles. Bad deals and rip-offs saw him working as a bus driver for 20 years. He was enticed back to record Lonely Just Like Me, released to rave reviews just before he died of a heart attack, aged 53. The HackTone album has 13 extra tracks; open up the sleeve and out tumble a series of separate photos, the original sleeve notes and press release, a facsimile of the handwritten album credits and, most poignantly, his funeral programme.

Deluxe packages and box sets are an obvious way to recycle old tracks in new clothes. The family headbanger might love Rhino’s Heavy Metal box set, which comes in a mini Marshall amplifier with a volume control that goes up to 11 (import only; £60), while dad’s inner hippie can be nourished by Love Is the Song We Sing, a lovingly curated 77-track San Francisco Nuggets box set (£40). Those who look fondly back to the years of Cool Britannia can raid the Brit Box, a compilation of 1990s Brit-pop tracks, lavishly presented (£40). Rhino’s view of box sets has changed of late. A year ago, it was considering pulling out of the market altogether. “Now,” says Rhino’s Robin Hurley, “both retailers and the public appreciate and demand exotic audio and video. The mould-breaker was the Cure’s Join the Dots: B-sides and Rarities, which was very successful. Now Rhino is looking for the rare, the unreleased and the live. We spend more on packaging to make the product more desirable and collectible. If we invest an extra $5 in packaging, we can charge $10 more.” (On average, packaging costs are 8%-10% of wholesale price; for box sets, it rises to 20%-25%.)

Greatest-hits packages go down a treat at Christmas. Rhino’s Cher and Fleetwood Mac best-ofs have sold in the millions, and Mothership, which will be stickered the Best of Led Zeppelin, is expected to sell 5m copies over the next year – all with 16-page booklets. Rhino’s Handmade imprint specialises in the rare and esoteric, and it also reissues vinyl albums with the original artwork. Joni Mitchell’s Blue costs $25 (£12).

Companies that care about the packaging often liken themselves to book publishers, who know a small number of people will pay a premium price for a hardback. “It is important,” Hurley says, “that we start valuing music again.” One way is to dress it in attractive packaging, designed by people who love music and are not solely ruled by the bottom line.