Ban this sick sticker filth
Friday, 1 February 2008
I’ve just bought a CD with one of those annoying stickers on the front obscuring the carefully-designed artwork to tell you how great it is. If it was a little more discreet I wouldn’t complain but this one isn’t just large, its bloody huge. It looks like it’s been positioned in order to attract passing space craft on the lookout for an impulse buy.
These stickers are one of those hangovers from the olden days before bleep.com, iTunes and MySpace; that terrifying era when you had to rely on reviews, rather than your own judgement, to tell you if an album was any good. I wonder if anyone, anywhere, has actually read the sticker on this album before cash has changed hands and the disc is on the doormat.
To make matters worse, the CD is in a cardboard sleeve with a matt finish, so removing the sticker will almost certainly tear half the cover off and/or leave a gluey mess. And the icing on the turd is that it says this:
The Gaurdian? The Gaurdian? So, not only has my nice new CD been ruined with a piece of crass marketing, it’s a piece of crass marketing with a fucking typo. And they wonder why people are switching to free downloads.
Luckily, the album is really good.
