These days almost all new CDs have a sticker on top of the plastic case, with the name of the artist and album on it. You know, the one that wraps around the top, and takes several minutes of concerted effort to remove if you want to actually, say, access and listen to the CD that you have just purchased.
It seems that this sticker could either stay entirely on top of the case, or somehow be a lot easier to remove. So it must be making it hard to open the case by design. Why? The obvious answer is that it’s somehow a theft deterrent, but I’m not sure I how that works. Is the idea to make it time-consuming to get into the packaging so you can’t pull the disc out of the packaging in the store? Many CD stores keep the whole thing in those big plastic frames that they have to remove at the counter anyway. And anyone who is trying to steal a cd by getting the disc out of the packaging already has to spend some time getting through the cellophane wrapping, which would not be much easier to do surrepticiously in the back of the store. It just doesn’t seem like a very effective/necessary device.
Anyway, after all that rambling… Can anyone confirm the anti-theft logic behind the sticker, or provide some alternate explanation for its existence? Or is the music industry just being a pain in the ass on general principle?
The sticker is not there for you–it is there to provide a product barcode on the side of the package that is easiest for them to read, the way they are packed at the production and distributor’s facilities. The CD’s are packed with their top edges up, in single-layer bins you see–so that way, all the barcodes of an entire bin can be easily and quickly machine-read. The perforations are there to help prevent people from taking the barcode off one CD and placing it on another.
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That makes sense. It would also be easy to find and organize CDs, especially when they look like this and the artist name is hard to find. By the way, may I recommend a CD opener. I have one similar to this, and it saves a lot of time getting the disc out. Once you’ve got it playing, you can remove the sticker entirely, but at least it’ll be open.
I think it’s more to deter people from buying a CD, burning a copy at home, reapplying shrink wrap and retruning it. Shrink wrap is pretty easy to apply with an iron and hot air gun while the tape strips would be much more difficult to defeat.
That or the (inser BBQ pit worthy epithet here)s who designed the package are space devils.
A quick tip for you that’s slightly related to the OP but was mentioned…
An easier way to get rid of the sticker on top is to pull the bottom hinge off of the jewel case and then swing the whole front upwards. After that you can just pull the two parts of the jewel case apart from each other.
Note you can see the names of the artist as well as the name of the CD.
That’s why it’s there: to make filing easier for the clerks and the CDs easier for the customers to find (a bar code would make that even easier).
Could it be made of something easier to remove? Sure. But no one ever decided not to buy a CD because of the tape on the edge, so why should the CD maker bother?
