Toll-Free Pan Flutes đ¶
Say what you will about cheesy music, but Heartland Music made a whole bunch of money selling it to the masses.
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For a time in the 1980s and 1990s, it was hard not to watch a TV show, especially on cable, and not see a commercial by the company Heartland Music.
The firm had a spectacular modelâessentially, it would find pop stars that had either seen better days or were unknown to American audiences and prop them up with mail order compilations that would be appealing to broad audiences. John Denver, Anne Murray, Conway Twitty? They all benefitted from this model.
One of the best-known examples of the âunknownâ approach came from Zamfir, a Romanian pan flutist who had been prominent enough to play Carnegie Hall in the 1970s but was unknown enough that you wouldnât have been able to pick him out of a lineup. But Heartland Music saw an opportunity to promote his vibe to Middle America, and boom, millions of sales, basically overnight. (Side note: We need a pan flute revival already.)
But perhaps you remember these commercials, which were effective vessels at putting multiple earworms into your brain, and never thought about Heartland Music, the company that put them there.
Well, it turns out that the firm had roots in another music industry icon for the oldsâLawrence Welk. These commercials began to emerge around the time that Welk retired, and his son helped to form Heartland Music, which was managed by Ira Pittelman, who originally made his name on disco music. It turned out there was an untapped market out there.
â[There were] all these people who were over 50 and uncomfortable going to record stores, and there was all this great music lying around in the vaults of the labels,â Pittelman told Billboard in 2002. âSo Heartland became a win-win situation.â
Sure, MTV was dominating the airwaves at the time, but these commercials were honestly even more effective. They didnât have to bother with the rest of the song. They could just hit you with five hooks in a minute, and boom, you had a whole album in your head.
Marketers would kill to find that kind of return today.
» Wanna learn more? Tedium has a whole piece about direct TV music marketing, including the tale of the forgotten country star whose career was brought back to life.