Retailing records series; (part 6) censorship (I)

Specialty record stores – even the huge chains such as Tower, Trans World, or Musicland – pale in penetration when compared to Wal-Mart. With more than 2,300 locations around the country, the huge discount department store often represents the only choice people have to buy records within an hour of where they live, particularly in rural areas. Since the mid-1990s, Wal-Mart has sold more pop music than any other retailer in America, accounting for around 52 million of the 615 million compact discs sold per year on average. Not bad for a store that stocks records as a part of a mix that runs from pillowcases to shotguns.

Not only does Wal-Mart sell the most records of any retailer in America, but often it sells them cheapest, too, which makes sense: get a customer into the record department (usually in the back of the store) and maybe he or she will buy a toaster, a tractor, a television, or some towels as well. For a department store, margin cuts both ways – it’s willing to gamble on a slight loss on a product to lure customers in to buy higher-margin items. Records are the classic loss leader.

But Brian K. Smith of Value Music Concepts explained the downside:

For the sake of a possible big first-week ranking, some front-page flier exposure, and power-aisle placement (next to greeting cards or candle rack), the labels have sold their souls to a sector that has not developed an act. All the care about is loss-leading and add-on transactions, and they do not care where the add-ons come from. In the process, the labels have allowed their product to be devalued in the eyes of the consumer thereby creating a situation where the traditional players look like thieves for expecting the same margin on sales as the get – only we have to do it without the benefit of a lawn-and-garden department.

In addition to marketing its store brand as a place for bargains, Wal-Mart takes great pains to promote and maintain an image as a “family” store. In certain areas, the local Wal-Mart serves as a social center. Even where I live, in an exurb-cum-suburb of New York City, one of the larger religious communities in the area uses the local Wal-Mart as a place to get together, schmooze, and, of course, shop. It even has elements of a pick-up bar – some have seen dates made by people who meet there.

“Our customers understand our music and video merchandising decisions are based on a common-sense attempt to provide the type of merchandise they might want to purchase,” a Wal-Mart spokesperson explained.

And what type of merchandise might they want to purchase? The answer is actually more what they don’t want to purchase, or perhaps what Wal-Mart doesn’t want to sell – entertainment with curse words, nudity, or violence – in short, no CD conveniently decorated with a “Parental Advisory Warning” sticker, otherwise known as “Tippa Stickas.”

Which brings us to a point where we need to back up. The sticker itself is a bit of “self-policing” by the record business; it resulted from an accident that started an avalanche. The controversy over the lyrics in popular music and what’s appropriate family entertainment made for some of the most entertaining moments in congressional history, but bloomed into one of the record business’s worst cases of agita and angst.

The simple beginnings involved an Ohio family named the Alleys, who liked the song “1999” from the Prince album of the same name. So one day in 1984 (how appropriately Orwellian), Mrs. Alley went to the store and bought a copy. So far, the record business approves and everybody’s happy.

While playing the album that evening, however, Mr. And Mrs. Alley stumbled on “Let’s Pretend We’re Married.” They found the lyrics so explicit that they turned down the volume lest their prepubescent daughter or seven-year-old son catch them.

It would have stopped right there, with Prince getting relegated to the hours after the kids went to bed, except that the Alleys were members of the Delshire Elementary School PTA. They proposed that some sort of warning be put on records to make parents aware of profanity, sex, violence, or vulgarity. In June of that year the PTA’s National Convention passed a resolution to that effect.

The mayor of San Antonio, Texas, saw this as an opportunity and made a lot of noise about a similar ratings system for concerts. All this was disturbingly reminiscent of the sort of film footage you can see from the 1950s, wherein Klansmen and White Citizen’s Council members talk about the evil influence of rock, and claim it as a conspiracy of communists, African Americans (not exactly in those words), and Jews.