Mail-a-Disc

There he is, between reels of the late show on TV, popping out from among the commercials for cars and permanent eyelashes--Boston Pops Conductor Arthur Fiedler, promoting a mail-order five-LP collection called A Library of the Greatest Musical Masterpieces. A twist of the dial and perched on a ledge overlooking Tuscan bell towers is Louis Prima delivering a husky-voiced hustle for a two-LP anthology of pop songs titled Love Italian Style. And isn't that--yes! It's Chubby Checker, coyly reminding viewers that he "used to do a little thing called the twist." Now Chubby is doing a little thing called hawking an LP of The Greatest Hits of Rock 'n' Roll.

The songs are dusty, and in many cases so are the singers: Who remembers Frankie Fanelli's Mala Femmana? With discount record outlets in most major cities, peddling warmed-over LP collections on TV would seem like a short cut to bankruptcy. Yet in two months Fiedler's two-minute pitch has sold over $1,000,000 worth of records. The Greatest Hits of Rock 'n' Roll has racked up $4,000,000 in sales, and Love Italian Style is nearing the $1,500,000 mark.

All three packages are released by a Manhattan-based firm called Dynamic House/Tele House, the newest and, by some accounts, the most successful of the mail-order record companies. The first legitimate firm in the field was Columbia House, a division of CBS, which was started in 1967 and has marketed over 50 albums (sample titles: The Look of Love, Country Classics, Music for a Rainy Afternoon).

In contrast to Columbia House, which records a good many of its own releases, Dynamic House/Tele House works exclusively with recycled masters from conventional labels. In its two years of existence, it has released 15 packages, 13 of which have been certified as gold records for million-dollar-plus sales. Dynamic's founder and president, high-voltage ex-Adman Larry Crane, 37, relies heavily on the current nostalgia vogue and on the existence of a large public that does not frequent record shops. "Anybody willing to write away for a record and wait four to six weeks to get it," he observes, "is not an average record customer." Along with Columbia House and such smaller competitors as the Longine Symphonette (a seven-record set by Nat King Cole), Crane's firm has made the TV-promoted mail-order market the fastest-growing segment of the record business.

Besides stimulating profits and memories, the mail-order LPs have revitalized some lagging careers. After Chubby Checker's plug for the rock-'n'-roll collection began appearing on TV, his popularity zoomed, enabling him to boost his fee for a nightclub date from $500 to as much as $5,000 a night.

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