“Not available in stores”
When I first started thinking about the marketing of musical intimacy (and what became Chapter 5 in the book), one set of examples that sprang to mind were a series of TV commercials for various mail order compilations in the 1980s-1990s. Ultimately, there “just wasn’t enough there there” to include these in Musical Intimacy, but they are worth revisiting and discussing as media artifacts that, despite their relative ephemerality, provide a unique spin on how notions of musical intimacy have been marketed to consumers.
Though a quaint notion from a 2023 vantage point, mail order music was big business in the pre-digital era, at least big enough to justify its existence. Distributors like Time-Life, Razor & Tie, and others put up the licensing fees to compile multi-record sets of popular hits, the selling point of which was not having to pay for a stack of albums when presumably consumers only wanted the radio hits anyway. As the advert for Razor & Tie’s 1993 compilation Totally ‘80s puts it, “If you went to the store and bought all these hits on CD, it’d cost you 400 bucks!” – making the $25, two CD set quite the bargain. These ads also made certain to point out that the compilations were “not available in any store,” emphasizing the exclusivity of the mail order pitch. Some compilations roped consumers into a subscription service, with new volumes of the series landing on customers’ doorsteps on a monthly basis. Others (like Totally ‘80s) were one-off, single purchase offers.
The scope of these collections varies widely, but typically each had some kind of thematic unity, be it driven by genre, time period, or some other characteristic. Romantically themed sets were common over the years, and it is specifically these sets that trade in part on a particular kind of musical intimacy.
The ad for Sessions Records’ 1986 collection Secret Love is exemplary.
The collection’s soft rock hits are just one part of the overall aesthetic – a white, presumably heterosexual couple donning fuzzy sweaters, canoodling by a roaring fireplace, with Secret Love providing the sonic backdrop for romantic and physical intimacy. When a jump cut finds the male on screen physically advancing on his love interest, we’re cautioned that Secret Love’s ability to generate intimacy is so powerful that it “really brings out the animal in some people.”
Starland Music’s 1994 Lost in Love collection repeats this motif, though it adds still life shots of glasses filled with red wine, as well as the declaration that the collection is “definitely a great album for those special times alone.”
The art work and commercial for Lakeshore Music’s Love Songs of the Seventies features a strange fixation on horses, though the equine companions disappear as if on cue when a snippet of Peter McCann’s “Do You Want to Make Love” is played.
The ads do tend to be racialized along predictable, stereotypical genre demarcations. Onyx Communications’ Hey Love collection presents three Black couples suffering through a boring get together that gets spiced up when the host drops the needle on his new album, which an off screen announcer tells us is filled with “the classic sound of sexy soul.” As the sound samples scroll, the scene lights dim as the couples dance close and slow. Hey Lover rescued the get together from stale boredom into yet another evening of romantic, physical intimacy. So potent is the collection’s ability to facilitate intimacy that one guest moves to borrow the host’s copy of Hey Love to continue the evening’s intimacy at home, but is rebuffed: “you’ve got to buy your own.”
These types of collections persisted through the 1990s, though by that decade, the commercials tended to feature music video clips rather than unique video copy. Time Life’s Ultimate Love Songs is one such example:
Likewise Rhino’s New Millennium Love Songs, though here the video clips are superimposed over a background of candy conversation hearts.
Numerous other examples from yesteryear play into these aesthetic tropes and stereotypes. Cheesy even in the context of their initial release, these ads attempt to make explicit the relationship between popular music (typically soft rock, sexy soul, or pop ballads) and intimacy. The implication is that these collections of mood music can facilitate romantic, physical, and sexual intimacy between consenting partners, though the ads present narrow identity representations of what sexual/romantic/sexual partners look like. Still, the ads restate a central claim that we make in Musical Intimacy which begins to get at the “why” question. Why (in its many iterations) is musical intimacy something that artists, engineers, producers, and marketers attempt to construct for listeners? The oversimplified answer is that listeners tend to find some kind of value in musical intimacy, be it an understanding of the artist (as in intimate recordings or performances), social bonds with others (as in the communitas generated among audience members), or music’s role in our personal (especially sexual and romantic) relationships. And if musically intimate experiences have value for listeners, constructing musical intimacy is a worthwhile endeavor on the part of artists, producers, and marketers.
-Zack