Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 101 posts

Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#91

Post by jdporter »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #39

Fun that some of the messages in-between the songs are for things like security being called to go to a particular zone of the store. I remember hearing those as a kid and wondering who got busted, never thinking that the announcement might be as fake as the security cameras.

It isn't always fake. I used to work in a retail chain store (I won't say its name, but it ends with "xx" and starts with "TJ") and we were trained to use certain codes on the PA when we needed security to come deal with a situation. The difference, I think, is that these real alerts were coded so as not to be understood by the customers.

Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#92

Post by jedberg »

makeworld wrote: post #89
agloeregrets wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find kinda strange in American Culture (as an American) is that the rest of the pop music tapes are pretty much just period music that no modern kid would recognize. The Christmas tape is a 100% known landscape. We let hits die but Christmas music is eternal.

https://xkcd.com/988/

I'm not sure on the accuracy of that XKCD graph. Last Christmas by Wham! is noticeably missing (released in 1984). Also All I Want for Christmas is You, released in 1994.

Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#93

Post by jedberg »

agloeregrets wrote: post #78
jedberg wrote: post #69

In case anyone is looking, here is a Christmas tape to get you in the mood. It even includes the ads! https://archive.org/details/KmartDecember1992

What I find kinda strange in American Culture (as an American) is that the rest of the pop music tapes are pretty much just period music that no modern kid would recognize. The Christmas tape is a 100% known landscape. We let hits die but Christmas music is eternal.

I think it's a combination of copyright and licensing.

The pop music they use on these tapes are cheap to license --- they weren't even popular when they were contemporary. They were just generic cheap music.

For Christmas, there is a set of Christmas music that just gets played every year and is licensed in blocks that are fairly cheap. That's why you hear a lot of "traditional standards" and not much else.

Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#94

Post by WalterBright »

whereistimbo wrote: post #77
WalterBright wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the cite: "everybody’s parents had the fucking thing" I guess I'm slightly different. My dad had "Herb Alpert's 9th" and I loved that album. Of course, his copy was ruined by the time I inherited it, and I trolled store after store for years looking for it. Finally, I found a mint copy still in the shrink wrap in the back for a couple bucks. I had my prize! Of course, collecting these things isn't fun anymore be…

I discovered Herb Alpert through YouTube recommendation this year when I was curating my Easy Listening Mix playlist [0], and damn it, Herb Alpert has all these slick songs! I used to listen to vaporwave in the past, I wonder why Herb Alpert isn't vaporwave material already. [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIc1-wxSJgpNoJkkukIFn...

Thanks! Enjoying your list. Check out Mantovani and Percy Faith, too.

Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#95

Post by whereistimbo »

WalterBright wrote: post #94
whereistimbo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I discovered Herb Alpert through YouTube recommendation this year when I was curating my Easy Listening Mix playlist [0], and damn it, Herb Alpert has all these slick songs! I used to listen to vaporwave in the past, I wonder why Herb Alpert isn't vaporwave material already. [0] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIc1-wxSJgpNoJkkukIFn...

Thanks! Enjoying your list. Check out Mantovani and Percy Faith, too.

I just checked them out, and they are awesome! Thanks for your recommendation!

Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#96

Post by Bootwizard »

raidicy wrote: post #80
Bootwizard wrote: post #27

FINALLY! I've been wanting to remix these kind of songs into hiphop songs for a long time. This is such a weird victory for music producers. These are a gold mine for hip hop sampling.

This is my exact intention as well. I've got the tracks open in my editor and just let it play until something catches my attention.

Have you found a way to download or torrent them all?

Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#97

Post by B-Con »

closeparen wrote: post #55

Oh man. Exurban wastelands of Nowhere, America. Endless fluorescent popcorn ceilings and despair. Is there another word for nostalgia, where instead of missing something you remember fondly, you are grateful to have escaped from something that seemed to drain your soul? I remember these places having an almost Dementor-like effect on me long before I was old enough to be a coastal elite or a classist or an architectu…

This made me both chuckle and cringe a bit. Well put.

The word you're looking for... My spouse suggested something related to trauma or PTSD. Then I saw "flashback" suggested.[0]

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/508877/is-there-...

Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#98

Post by EvanAnderson »

Late to the party on this one but I wanted to leave this note for posterity. Turns out that there's an interesting business story and a timely death tied-in here too.

I got curious because some of the tapes bear the name of an audio production company in Greenville, OH, a few miles down the road from my hometown. The booming male voice on the recordings also sounded familiar to me, too. I'm fairly certain I heard him on the local radio station that my father played over the PA in our family grocery store when I was growing up.

I did some searching and learned that back on November 30, the gentleman who founded the audio company, and who acted as the "voice of K-Mart", died.

It looks like he was involved in ventures that persist today. His company EchoSat[1] (which I'd heard of with some past involvement in the convenience store / retail petroleum industry) recently merged with an IT security firm to become "ControlScan".

Quoting the obituary[2]:

He started Tower Sound and Communications while in Greenville to pursue a venture that would eventually spearhead "in store" broadcasting for companies such as Kmart (he became the voice of Kmart) and Jamesway which evolved into another corporation in KY called EchoSat that would use satellite technology in helping with multiple stores for POS processing and security.

There's an interview with Lee Rutherford in 2011.[3] He absolutely still has that "radio voice".

[1] https://www.dandb.com/businessdirectory/towercommunicationsg...

[2] https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailyadvocate/obituary.asp...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQqoQL3pkyI

Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#99

Post by raidicy »

Bootwizard wrote: post #96
raidicy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my exact intention as well. I've got the tracks open in my editor and just let it play until something catches my attention.

Have you found a way to download or torrent them all?

No but I imagine you could write a simple script to parse the links and download them en mass. No idea if archive inhibits such a thing though.

Re: Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive

#100

Post by whereistimbo »

whereistimbo wrote: post #72
pasdechance wrote: post #59

I was just thinking about this a few days ago and even made a note to go look them up on archive.org. I think someone shared this a few years ago and it got picked up by buzzfeed (or whatever). When I worked retail we had this but it was a mini-cd system that looked like a GameCube. My boss was a little bit forced into investing in it because a customer was furious that a P!nk song on the radio had the word "ass" or…

Not every radio plays Clean version/radio edit of pop songs?

https://pastebin.com/xJSGGpZi
Post reply on HN