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NEW YORK — Bar codes for record jackets, long-awaited and long-debated, finally began making their first appearance last week, with two west coast independent labels in the lead.
Pacific Arts Records and Chrysalis Records released two bar-coded albums each last week. All of the bar codes were printed on the back of the record jacket, in the upper right hand corner, measuring about one and three-quarter inches by one and one-quarter inches. The position and measurement represent the consensus of an RIAA bar-coding committee that has been planning the implementation for two years.
The Chrysalis bar-coded releases were the debut album by Sally Oldfield, and the third album by The Babys, Head First. The Pacific Arts releases were the debut of the Pacific Steel Company and Charles Lloyd's Weavings.
CBS will be the first of the branch-distributed labels to issue bar-coded albums, with Elvis Costello's Armed Forces lp this week. Costello and his management had expressed a desire to be CBS's first bar-coded album, and before the new codes were ready the Columbia art staff had designed an oversized, fake bar code that would have occupied the entire back cover of the new album. The bar code parody idea was dropped, however, and the code that appears on Costello's album due for release this week is "real and functional," in the words of a CBS spokesperson.
The next bar-coded album product planned by CBS will be the Masterworks classical release scheduled for later this month. Ultimately, all CBS albums will be bar-coded.
Of the other companies that have announced plans to bar-code their records, none is yet ready to put such albums in the stores. The Warner Communications record companies and ABC Records, for instance, have received their Universal Product Code numbers and have planned for their implementation, but do not have bar-coded records ready for imminent release.
Bar-coded records, like any other products using the codes, would be scannable by machines at retail outlets. Each scan would register a sale, categorize the product and identify the manufacturer, thereby speeding up inventory checking, billing, and returns.
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