Soft Sell
Here’s a departure from our many years of posting interesting cover art – the inner sleeve. I found this one today and it made me nostalgic for those innovative years during the 1960’s when the record labels hired young people to do the marketing and gave them the freedom to be creative and groundbreaking, irreverent and anti-establishment. You can see this in the packaging, liner notes, advertisements, billboards, promotions and collateral of the time. Unfortunately, when the business got so big and bloated in the mid-seventies, the crazies that were running the asylum got put back in their rooms and corporate suits took back the reins. Here’s an example from the guys in the marketing dept. of Buddah Records. (Click on the cover to enlarge!)
“Temporary Sleeve”
“We sat around for a couple of weeks, here in our offices, trying to figure out what to put on our album sleeves. It wasn’t easy. We didn’t want to do a hard sell, the old “show-them-the-other-album-covers” approach … and we didn’t want to get esoteric and cute. So we blew it! We didn’t have it ready in time to go to press. So we did this. A non-sleeve … the softest sell in music business history. Just let us say, however, that the album you are now holding is only part of THE BUDDAH GROUP.”
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