You don’t put a Picasso in an Ikea frame

Remember when all cds looked like this?

Especially classical music cds.

Well, Bejun Mehta’s new cd ‘Ombra Cara’ is one of many new releases which is placing an importance on presentation; after all you don’t put a Picasso in an Ikea frame.

Even budget classical labels are getting more imaginative:

But there have a long way to go until they meet the creative brilliance of those boys in the rock world. The wittier ones are usually pretending not to be a simple, silver cd. There’s the carousel slide holder:

A retro-look floppy disc design (inside there’s a pink cd):

And the recently released salami look for the Lithuanian group Shidlas, sold in a vacuum pack with bar codes and sell by date:

The internet’s favourite cd design (try googling) wasn’t meant to be witty or, in this case, a little rude, and it’s not a music cd at all. The Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor provided a software cd for setting up an adsl connection, with a punchy modern look suitable for a dynamic group offering fast connection speeds. They didn’t reckon on little fingers slipping through the hole in the middle as the cd is taken out of its box.

Gramilano( Editor )

Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano’) about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.

His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia’ column for Dancing Times magazine.