Longbox

The longbox is an exterior packaging format for compact discs that was common in North America through the early 1990s. As the name implies, it is essentially a long (11.5" x 5") cardboard box, usually shrinkwrapped, and containing one or more jewel-cased compact discs. It is typically designed to be discarded after purchase.

Purpose

The longbox benefited two audiences.

The first audience was music retailers, who wanted a way to display CDs without having to replace their existing store fixtures -- most of which were designed to store and display LPs in 12"x12" jackets. Two rows of longboxes could fit side-by-side in a standard LP bin, minimizing the amount of money store owners had to spend to adopt the new format. The size of the longbox also made it more difficult for shoplifters to conceal, especially compared to the easily-pocketable jewel case.

The second audience was record labels, who had spent years and millions of dollars building plants to manufacture cardboard record sleeves. As sales of vinyl dropped, use of the cardboard longbox allowed the labels to keep those manufacturing plants in business. The size of the longbox also gave the labels room for promotional descriptions of the release, similar to the cover notes that often appeared on releases in the pre-Rock era.

Design

• Most cardboard longboxes enclosed the compact discs inside completely, and featured separately printed cover artwork on their exterior.
• Two-disc releases were usually packaged as two single-disc jewel cases inside a standard-thickness longbox. The longbox was poorly suited as packaging for the "fat" multi-disc jewel cases available at the time, but some releases did use both.
• Some longboxes had a "window" that made the CD inside -- and its artwork -- visible. On these, the longbox itself might feature additional artwork specific to the release, or might be generic to the label or series within which the release was issued.
• Some longboxes were manufactured with end flaps that could be opened without damaging the packaging. Later longboxes typically had the end flaps sealed with glue.
• CDs intended for sale outside of North America weren't packaged in longboxes. Retailers who imported and sold these CDs sometimes inserted them into blank, "windowed" longboxes designed for this purpose, or sealed them inside clear plastic "clamshell" cases of a similar size.
• Later in the 1980s, some labels moved from the cardboard longbox to a similarly-sized "blister pack" of clear heat-sealed plastic. These typically included an 11.5" x 5" paper insert featuring the release's cover artwork. These were seen as sturdier, and also adapted better to multidisc cases.
• A small number of cassette-format releases (particularly cassette singles) were issued in longboxes during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Controversy and Decline

Opposition to the longbox grew during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Longbox packaging was usually discarded immediately by the purchaser, which many consumers and recording artists found wasteful. It proved to be a poor solution at retail as well: shoplifters quickly discovered how easily a longbox could be folded in half and shoved into a jacket, or simply torn open, and store owners were frustrated by how easily the packages were damaged in shipment or on the shelf. As the used CD market grew, retailers had an increasing number of ways to securely display jewel-cased compact discs, most of which solved these problems.

As opposition to the longbox grew, the record industry proposed a number of alternative packaging solutions, none of which were broadly accepted. Many of these designs, such as the Digitrak and the so-called Eco-Pak, used nearly as much cardboard as the longbox. They were also seen as much less durable than than standard plastic jewel case -- which, unlike the cardboard-based packages, could at least be replaced if it were damaged. (Warner Bros., which owned the packaging firm Ivy Hill from 1988 until late 2003, was especially notorious for trotting out a different cardboard-based CD package every year or two. The influence of this relationship continued well into the DVD era, with early Warner DVD releases being issued in the mostly-cardboard "snap case".)

Legacy

The vast majority of compact discs sold worldwide are now sold in shrinkwrapped jewel cases or jewel case sized packaging. Specialty music retailers often display these releases in longbox-sized plastic "keepers" which are opened at the register when the item is purchased, and retained by the store for reuse.

Some larger retailers like Costco still use longboxes to help deter shoplifting. They are usually a generic "windowed" design, but some are full-blown old-school enclosed longboxes with release-specific cover artwork.