The Downward Spiral of CD Sleeve Print Quality
Being an idiot, a few years ago I decided to sell my entire CD collection that I had built up over fifteen years. It was comprised of about half new, half second hand purchases and it was about half electronic music, half indie/rock. I figured keeping them were pointless. iTunes destroyed my desire to maintain a library of MP3s (a story for another day, I don't even own a CD player, a lot of the music in the collection I would be unlikely to ever touch again.
I haven't really regretted my decision to sell apart from one aspect - my Nine Inch Nails CDs. NIN is my favourite band and I should have kept the disks. Like the rest of my collection these were about half second hand, half new (after With Teeth, guess when I became a fan) but they were my copies with their own unique wear and aging to the cardboard sleeves. I kept Year Zero - unsurprisingly, my favourite - but the rest I sold on.
I was in HMV the other day and they had sealed new copies of The Fragile, Add Violence and The Downward Spiral. It struck me that I can just repurchase what I sold. Even if I leave them shrink-wrapped, I'd like to own them, plus I get to support HMV over Amazon.
I bought two of the three.. and left The Downward Spiral on the shelf. Why? Well the print quality of the album sleeve looked like a cheap knockoff. It was like a photocopy with low resolution print evident around the text. Do they reduce the quality of older albums? Seems disrespectful to the music, as if old music is somehow inherently less valuable than new music. This theory might be bullshit though as The Fragile looks fine.
I've set to eBay to buy the rest of the albums but now I'm acutely aware that I don't want more modern print runs in case their sleeves are worse quality than older runs. You would have hoped that there would be no difference but alas, here we are. It's very difficult to distinguish this on eBay as people either use stock photos are very poor quality photos. After all, it's 'just a CD' who cares about the quality of the art?
I do.
I actually emailed an eBay seller of The Downward Spiral to ask how , old this specific copy of the album was. I even explained why I was asking. "1994, as it says the description!" they rudely replied. I clarified my position; that the album is 1994, but even new copies in stores say '1994' on the back - that's the release date, not the print date. "When was this particular copy purchased, do you know?", I asked.
"It's old!"
Right, ok, unhelpful and an asshole. Clicking the seller's name it appears they are a storefront rather than an individuals so I understand that it may not be practical to answer such specific questions, but what is his understanding here? That all albums print their year of production on the back? If that's the case, these all say 1994 - so he thinks they did one huge batch of the album in 1994 and all new copies are thirty years old?