Vintage Music Bundling Subscriptions

Music Bundling and Subscriptions have been around for a while. This is what a bundled music ad looked like mid-1980’s. Retro! But what’s with the gypsy?

Back in the day, I signed up for a competing service, the Colombia Record Club. They had this Gold Box TV promotion, what today might be called an Easter Egg or JetBlue Hacker Special. If you saw the TV ad, you were aware of an otherwise unlabeled small yellow rectangle on the print ad that if filled out with an album number, would get you one more album. What cross-channel marketing smarts that was! It made you feel like you knew something secret, even though those TV ads were ubiquitous.

It worked on me.

What this RCA service and Colombia music service tucked away in the fine print is an “opt-out” service. For my grade-school enthusiasm, I didn’t read carefully, despite the ad following the FTC negative option plans rules.

By ordering your promotional first few albums for some small amount, you were also signing up for a monthly subscription. Each month, if you didn’t mail back an option card declining the Selection of the Month, a new album arrived. I recall receiving that first subscription album where I missed the option card. I now had this $10 bill to pay, but no money to pay for it. D’oh.

So the gypsy in the RCA ad here is a reference to that Colombia subscription tactic. The RCA program had a smaller minimum order. Though once the year subscription ran out, you still had to “negative option” each month’s new album until you cancelled your “membership”.

It’s hard to make out in the photo, but the ad has a mini Terms of Service in the blue order form. It’s right next to the comical “tape penny here” circle¹. It says:

I enclose 1¢. Please accept my trial membership in the RCA Music Service and send me the 4 hits I’ve indicated here under the terms outlined in this advertisement. A agree to buy just 1 more hit at regular Music Service price in 1 year’s time – after which I will receive a free bonus tape or record. Then I may cancel my membership. (A shipping and handling change is added to each shipment.)

Reading the text of the ad and comparing it to the FTC site, I can see the FTC rules coming through, like the: “You’ll always have 10 days to decide” construction.

I wish I had TOSDR back then. Not that my 13-year-old self would have read it.

Also, note in both the RCA and Colombia bundling services, there’s two levels of bundling here. First is album itself, where one hit song may drive the purchase of the entire album. Second is that four other albums are subsidized at the 1¢ “purchase” price by two albums at full price. Today, the bundling is being done at the music stream level, which the industry is sorting out right now.

(The ad is from a Sunday comics section of the Star-Legder. Sunday comics were the only sections of the paper printed in color.)