Anyone who did not grow up in the 1970’s or 1980’s would probably not even know what K-Tel Albums were.
If you grew up in that era, you had a lot of music filling the airwaves…..but very few options on how you could actually own particular songs.
If you had a favorite song…
You could go out and by the whole album in which the song appears…..but if you were like me, you were too cheap to buy a whole album for 1 or 2 songs that you liked, seeing as how you would be stuck with 10-12 other songs that you could not have cared less about.
You could buy a 45-RPM Single record of the song. These were easy enough, but buy enough .45’s and they start piling up all over the house, and having to go to the record player to change the dang record every 3-4 minutes was a real pain in the butt, especially for a World-Class lazy person like myself.
You could get your Ghetto-Blaster or Stereo System with the built-in cassette deck, and you could sit patiently by the radio, waiting for your favorite song to come on, at which point you could manually record it, along with endless chatter by the DJ at the beginning and end of the song in question.
When all those options were not enough, you had K-TEL.
K-Tel Records was a company that produced music albums from the early 1970’s to the mid 1980’s and beyond (Well beyond..). They were the “Mix-Tape” Kings of Record Albums, producing inexpensive Albums which contained a variety of the popular songs of the day. Musically, they were all over the place….. A typical K-Tel Album might feature everything from Barry Manilow, to Kiss, to KC and the Sunshine Band, to Engelbert Humperdinck, all on the same album.
Every K-Tel collection that was ever released was billed as “the greatest collection of hits EVER!!”…..
With such a variety of music, you might only like 10 of the 15-20 songs on the album, but price-wise, it was still the best route to go if you were too cheap to buy an artist’s entire album.
The audio quality of the songs were not always the greatest as the songs were heavily compressed to fit as many songs onto an album as possible. In some cases, songs were actually shortened in order to squeeze in more music.
Think of them as the “Dollar General” of Album production during the 1970’s….
I was heavily into the taping songs off the radio onto cassette tapes myself, but I did own quite a few albums, and a bunch of them were K-Tel Albums.
The company imploded during the DOT.COM bubble of the late 1980’s…..but did not die….
K-Tel International is based in Winnipeg, Canada and is still cranking out music compilations, often under the “As Seen on TV” logo.
If you are shopping in your local “Dollar General” or some other low-end retailer, and you see an amazing collection of modern music at too good of a price to be true……you are probably looking at a K-Tel product.
But, they are still going strong…..bringing inexpensive, cheap music to tightwads around the World!
No comments:
Post a Comment