We created this blog to allow you to ask questions of the staff at Paste.  We’re now in our 6th year of publishing and we’ve grown considerably.  But we don’t want to lose touch with the people we do this for.  We want to know what concerns or delights you, and we want you to get to know us a little better.  Paste is not this impersonal mega-corp too busy chasing profits to take time for those it should care most about.  We’re still a scrappy small business, fighting day in and day out to do the best job we can.  We don’t run our decisions through committees and highly paid research companies.  We just try to follow our instincts.  We know what we like, and we’d like to know more about what you like and dislike.

So.... I’ll start by answering a question that’s come up a lot in the last five months:  What’s the deal with your CD sleeves?

To be sure, we’re not happy with how we’ve handled the sleeves.  First, we took the song listings off so our art director could knock himself out and do something creative.  We had no idea so many people cared so passionately about song titles on the CD.  Since the sampler sleeve web page has always been one of our most visited pages, we thought it was unnecessary.  Lead time on CD production (which gets tacked onto magazine production, which gets added to mail time) is long.  By the time we heard your complaints, we were approaching our 5th anniversary issue in July.  By then, we thought we’d found a great solution: a paper sleeve that you could save and that would have all the track information and a nice design.  And it was more environmentally friendly than our petroleum-based plastic sleeve.  Unfortunately, the perforation was too high and too light, and CDs fell out at the printer.  Some subscribers had to call for replacements.  We caught that early and, for August, had the CD perf moved down and made more difficult.  Too difficult.  As one subscriber said, you needed a potato peeler to open the CD sleeve.  With our lead times, this took several months to correct.  Finally, in November we thought we had a solution: a side perf that was easy to tear.  We even trumpeted this in the editorial: “Hey, it’s fixed.” But late in manfucturing (too late to do anything about), we discovered it was too easy again.  CDs were lost in binding.  And due to poor quality glue, some CDs slid down and were actually cut by the binding process.  Once this started happening, the sleeve had to be turned sideways, forcing you to tear the whole thing apart.

D’oh.  Trust me, we’re appropriately embarrassed by the situation and have yelled at all the appropriate parties.  We’re committed to finding a good solution, ASAP.  December’s CD should be OK.  For 2008, we are looking at a solution that would give you a normal-sized cardboard CD sleeve that is truly keepable.  No more 45-LP-sized CD sleeves that you can’t open.  We will get there, hopefully by the February issue.

So my humblest, most sincere apologies for the problems you’ve had.  Please know that we all take the problem seriously.  Also, if you ever have problems with missing or damaged CDs, you can contact customer service for a replacement.

Please use the comment portion of this blog to ask new questions of the Paste team.  Each week, we will select a question to answer in our email newssletter, the Paste Lifeline.  (We won’t answer every question or respond here; we just don’t have the staff to do this by blog.  We do, however, have a great customer service team that can help you with your subscription.  Just check the “Subscriber Services” tab on the home page.)

Thanks on behalf of all the Paste team,

Tim Regan-Porter
Publisher