If you watched daytime television in the early 70's, odds are you you heard commercials featuring snippets of songs fired at you in rapid order, with the added admonition "Not sold in stores!" You would then be presented with an address where you could mail a check for a very reasonable sum in order to receive a record album or eight-track tape in the mail.
Except for the anxious waiting, it was win-win.
K-tel hawked kitchen gadgets, Miracle Brushes, and records on television in the 60's and 70's. They became a familiar part of our living room ambiance, as we would step out to the kitchen or bathroom in the middle of a Roy Rogers movie to the voice of a fast-talking K-tel pitchman. The salesmen were frequently imitated by comedians. Who can forget Dan Aykroyd's Bass-O-Matic blender on SNL?
Philip Kives, K-tel's founder, was a Saskatchewan farmer before becoming a door-to-door appliance salesman. Not satisfied with trudging suburban sidewalks, Kives began presenting his vacuum cleaners and other home appliances in public areas such as fairs or the boardwalk in Atlantic City. In 1962 Philip and his brother Ted launched Syndicate Products Ltd. in the basement of his parents' Winnipeg home. One of the company's early endeavors was a five-minute television commercial for Teflon-coated cookware. The amazing sight of an egg not sticking to a pan (Teflon was brand new, remember) sold a whole slew of frying pans.
K-tel made TV commercials that ran longer than the standard sixty seconds and aired them at off-peak hours, a practice which has evolved into today's 2:00 AM infomercials. Of course, you'll recall that they ran thousands of traditional ads, too.
In 1965, Kives bought the rights to a few country music tunes and released the paradoxically titled 25 Country Hits with Groovy Greats. The man had a Midas touch. The weirdly-named album sold 180,000 copies in Canada.
He turned his eyes southward and in 1971 released his first US-marketed compilation: 25 Polka Classics. It sold a cool million copies.
Like their sales pitches, the albums started coming out fast after that. Compilations were released every couple of weeks for a while covering every conceivable genre, including the under-appreciated World's Worst Music category. Polkas, classic rock (before the term even existed), country/western, blues, Perry Como (whatever you call his style of music), it was all covered.
K-tel managed to license a whole lot of music at a very reasonable rate. They passed the savings on to consumers. The result was that you could get real songs by original artists at a fraction of the cost of buying albums from the mainstream record companies.
Nowadays, the idiots who run the RIAA are doing all they can to ensure that you will continue to buy CD's at fifteen bucks apiece. If K-tel was to start up today, no doubt they would be met with firm refusals to license songs more cheaply. Instead of K-tel, savvy consumers are bypassing CD's in stores and buying music online, in many cases bypassing the RIAA altogether. Odds are the cigar-smoking clueless clods will go out of business before giving the public what they want: affordable music, just like K-tel gave us so many years ago.
Comments (5)
Isn't it ironic that RON POPEIL came from the
great white north as well? And now Celine Dion? I suppose its just revenge for all that acid rain we've been sending them. Karma indeed comes around again. Per the K-tel albums, I remember Sears had a whole shelf of records dedicated to the brand. The record companies had no competition, cassette tapes were awful and just getting popular anyway, and they had nothing to lose by licensing songs to K-tel. It was like movie theaters, in that the original albums were like first-run theaters, with better quality prints and hipper venues, the K-tel albums would be the
equivalent of second and third run houses...
worse prints(remember that K-tel edited all the songs, sometimes simply lopping off the last couple minutes, or
chopping out whole guitar solos), and a slight time lag(the music was 6 months to a year old, though you got the occasional new hit, typically a cheesy
"The night Chicago died"
type song). The typical buyer of K-tel albums were kids that bought 45's and didn't have enough cash for entire albums. While the older teen-aged kin wouldn't be caught dead without
the original albums, pre-teens ate them up.
Not quite old enough to appreciate a great edited guitar riff anyway, we were happy.
One last forgotten thing...trying to count
the groove gaps to find a particular song to play on a side with 13 songs. Probably the kids who got good at it became our first mixers and DJ's...so I guess you can trace the whole hip-hop movement to K-tel....who would have thunk? LOL....
Posted by Scott | July 26, 2007 1:03 PM
Posted on July 26, 2007 13:03
Very funny. I had forgotten about the K-tel records. Wow. And who remembers all the "cover" albums...the hits sung by no name cover bands?
And, yup, I remember counting the gaps AND stacking multiple LPs for parties. Diamond needles and K-tel records...now that was a party.
Posted by Wendy Spiegel | August 18, 2007 11:09 AM
Posted on August 18, 2007 11:09
Very funny. I had forgotten about the K-tel records. Wow. And who remembers all the "cover" albums...the hits sung by no name cover bands?
And, yup, I remember counting the gaps AND stacking multiple LPs for parties. Diamond needles and K-tel records...now that was a party.
Posted by Wendy Spiegel | August 18, 2007 11:09 AM
Posted on August 18, 2007 11:09
I remember buying a couple K-Tel albums around 72. "I believe in Music" was the name I remember. Lot of 72 stuff. BUt K-tel used to cut songs short, sometimes drastically so, so you ended up buying oldies 45s later or getting albums. But in POrtland Maine, we didn't always get everything on radio that was selling elsewhere in the nation. Likewise, we heard some stuff unknown to rest of nation like the 2nd Brownsville Station album. K-tel would be a good intro to some of that missing stuff. Overall, I liked K-tel, even though they also annoyed me with cutting songs short like Argent's Hold You Head Up.
Long live the 60s and 70s!
Posted by Scott Irving | September 27, 2008 10:40 PM
Posted on September 27, 2008 22:40
SUPERBAD!!! Twenty Soul-sational sounds from the brothers and sisters that made them great! Super Bad!!Only 8.98 Eight Tracks 10.98...From KTEL!
Heard this commercial many aday on television. I probably own that Country music Ktel album?
Posted by Rivers End | June 26, 2009 7:27 PM
Posted on June 26, 2009 19:27