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Re: [ARSCLIST] lp, cassette, 8-track cut-outs?
Michael Biel wrote:
One of the most novel programs of marking covers was done by RCA Victor
in the late 60s but these were NOT cut-outs, although they pretended to
be. There were a lot of albums that were slow sellers but were still
selling just a bit. Plus they still had a large stocks of printed but
unglued front cover slicks for these albums. They figured they would
never be able to use these up trying to sell them at full price, so they
"deleted" several hundred of these albums, glued the slicks to the
cardboard but cut a little triangular notch in just the paper of the
rear cover which allowed the cardboard to show thru there on the left
edge on the rear. Then they pressed up the records on Dynaflex and
inserted the records into the jackets without innersleeves. This made a
package that was relatively lightweight to ship, which reduced costs.
Then they sold the newly manufactured records to distributors and
dealers at cut-out prices -- and here is the important part of the story
-- without paying royalties because these, supposedly, were cut-outs.
But because all of these were on the newly introduced Dynaflex material
they couldn't fool anybody. It was obvious they were newly
manufactured. They ended up having to pay millions of dollars in fines
and restitutions to the performers and music copyrights owners who sued
them.
I picked up quite a few of these in the early 70s..$1.49 at Radio Shack. Many
were albums I hadn't seen for years, like Artie Shaw's "Any Old Time", Horowitz
playing the Brahms 2nd Concerto et al. Interesting.
dl