album radio spots, 1967-82

Continuing with my last post on the decline of urban music retail, here’s a truly extinct medium: the album radio spot. These advertisements flourished in an era when record companies pursued mass markets of radio listeners who bought their music in record stores. How many of those conditions exist anymore, at least in this combination?

Typically 60 seconds longs, the album radio spot teased listeners with musical snippets, maybe the artist’s own spoken voiceover, and — best of all — some creative copy. I think the latter are the real pleasures of the album radio spot, especially when they tried to ‘speak the language’ of their targeted market. Consequently, as you cycle through the different years of spots below, conceivably you can track the changing ‘voice’ of the youth, specifically as the advertising industry understood it. Compare, for example, the spots for the Byrds’ Ballad of Easy Rider (1967), Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality (1971), and ZZ Top’s Deguello (1979) to hear what I mean.

I assembled the archive of album radio spots you see here through simple YouTube searches (“album radio spot,” “album radio commercial”). It raises several questions:

Why all the results centered around 16 years, 1967-82. Were those really the only years that record companies promoted their new releases via radio advertising? Did they switch over to TV advertising?
Why are almost all of the albums below squarely in the rock genre? In fact, the Curtis Mayfield spot may be more of a PSA than an album radio spot, but it’s pretty awesome nonetheless.
Were these advertisements all national campaigns, played on radio stations across the entire country?
Is it me, or with a few notable exceptions (Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush) were none of these records exactly mega-sellers in their day? Was the album radio spot an advertising medium of last resort? Why are all of these plainly North American advertisements? (Okay, I did find a Dutch radio commercial for Abba’s 1981 album The Visitors.)

If you have any answers, or if you know of other album radio spots online, please share them in the comments section below. Until then… enjoy! I suggest you listen to all of these in sequence as a YouTube playlist of album radio spots, letting them wash over your ears as a listener might back when car radios had those little punch-button pre-sets. Otherwise, here are individual links to the playlist’s contents.