I HAD TO MUCH TO DREAM LAST NIGHT: RANDOM SCENES VOL. 3

1. Coins of the realm

I am in a society that has been separated into two realities (located in the same physical space). You can tell which one yr in by the coins they accept, because the coins are made of metal that exist in one reality only. So if you bring money from one to the other, it ceases to exist. Somewhere in the dream I am made aware of a cross-border currency smuggling scheme that tries to get around this.

2. Gilligan’s Island: the video game

I am playing Nintendo with my friend Rhonda. The game is based on Gilligan’s Island, only the island is much smaller than the previous one – just some rocks and a single tree. In the game, you have to do things like weave pieces of paper together to build a hut.

3. Don’t tease the angry vengeance god

Someone is repeatedly trying to unleash an angry vengeance god of some kind. The god is in the form of a statue (like a tiki god), and is harmless until you perform the invocation that awakens it, after which it starts wreaking havoc and mayhem until it finds the thing it was summoned to destroy. Then you shout “DISMISSED!” and it freezes into a statue again. Some idiot keeps activating it – like making prank phone calls – just to get it to move.

Stop doing that,

This is dF

THE GREAT ROCK’N’ROLL SWINDLE (MAIL ORDER EDITION)

Previously, I blogged about how K-Tel Records was a key (and cheap) tool for discovering new music. 

That was for the 45-single market.

If you wanted to stock up on complete albums, there was this.



[Via Beatnik Daddio]

Some of you may remember this. Columbia House and RCA Record Club (later known as BMG Music Service) were the two big mail-order music companies of the day. The magazine offers varied – I remember RCA offering six (6) albums for a penny. There was also a direct mail version, where they’d send you the forms and a bunch of stamps with album cover art for each available selection. You pasted the stamps in the order form and mailed it off.

This was, of course, very seductive to my teenage self, who not only loved music and had limited funds for it, but also collected stamps. A lot of those stamps ended up as decorations.

Like a lot of kids my age, I paid a lot more attention to the hook (13 albums for cheap) than the fine print (i.e. every month you get a brochure featuring the Album Of The Month, which would automatically be mailed to you – at which point you had to either pay for it or go to the trouble of sending it back – unless you actively responded by mail and told them not to send it. The business term for it is “negative option billing”).

Consequently, like a lot of kids my age (or at least the ones who weren’t very detail-oriented, and were really poor at mail correspondence), I paid for one or two albums but ultimately ended up defaulting on my obligation to buy “x” number of records in three years, and also ended up with a number of albums I normally wouldn’t have owned.

Happily, one of them was Black Sabbath’s Mob Rules, which is one of my favorite albums to this day.

Anyway, I look back on this and wonder how Columbia House and RCA ever managed to keep it running as long as they did. Reportedly, one way they did it was by paying sub-par licensing fees to the publishers, and by getting the master tapes and making their own cheap copies of albums instead of buying them direct from the labels.

Even so, the business model had to be susceptible to all kinds of fraud. Making it a cumbersome process for the customer could only have exacerbated the problem.

If you’ve ever seen A Serious Man, the scene where Michael Stuhlbarg gets a call from CRC’s collections dept is not only brilliant nostalgic cinema, it also cuts to the heart of the main flaw in the mail-order record-club model: no age verification, or even identity verification. I can’t have been the only minor who filled out that form, got my albums, defaulted, and turned out to be a dead end in terms of collection.

Certainly a lot of adults tried it. There’s an urban legend about how lots of people knew this guy who sent in a fake name and a friend’s address to scam some free records. Some of them are probably true. In an extreme case, one guy acquired nearly 27,000 CDs, using over 2000 fake accounts and 16 P.O. boxes, which he then sold at flea markets. Of course, we know this because he got caught and was convicted for mail fraud.

I wasn’t nearly that devious or calculating. Still, it’s accurate to say I suckered both companies out of something like 21 albums.

Take that, Corporate Rock.

EPILOGUE: In the end it wasn’t fraud that ended Columbia House (which actually eventually merged with BMG Music Service), but licensing lawsuits and – what else? – digital music. That said, the Columbia House brand still survives as a DVD/Blu-ray service.

Join the club,

This is dF