K-tel

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For the Albuquerque Telemundo station, see KTEL-LP.

K-tel International is an "As-Seen-On-TV" company^{[citation needed]}, which is most noted for its compilation music albums, such as "The Super Hits" series, "The Dynamic Hits" series and "The Number One Hits" series.^{[citation needed]} It is also known for "The Record Selector"," The Micro-Roast", "The Tote-a-Tune portable stereo", and many other products.

1 History
2 Dot com Bubble's effect on K-tel
3 Trivia
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] History

The company has been in business since the late 1960s and is based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. They also have subsidiaries or other controlled entities in the U.S., the UK and Germany. In the UK the company is known as "K-tel UK Limited". In the U.S. and Canada it is known as "K-tel International". In fact, the compilation albums listed distribution as such, with an address of Minnetonka, MN.

The founder of K-Tel was Philip Kives.^[1] Kives, a fast-talking demonstration salesman who had previously sold cookware door-to-door, harnessed the power of television to sell Teflon-coated frying pans of dubious quality. Kives bought and marketed a number of other products from Seymour Popeil, father of Ronco founder Ron Popeil such as the "Dial-o-matic," a type of food slicer that allowed the user to "dial in" the thickness of slices produced, the Veg-o-matic, and the "Feather Touch Knife."

The combination of inexpensive goods, mail-order distribution and a well-honed simple sales pitch were a hard combination to beat. Kives took his "Feather Touch Knife" on the road starting in August, 1965 and by Christmas had sold one million knives with a net profit of one dollar a knife. ^[2] In 1966, Kives released K-Tel's first Compilation album, a collection of 25 Country songs.

K-Tel was formally founded in 1968. After a very successful 1970s, the company expanded rapidly both through acquisitions in their core area of business as well as diversifying into other areas. The company acquired rival Candlelite Records in 1980, and also formed subsidiaries in areas such as real estate and oil exploration^[3]. By 1984, the high-risk ventures had sapped the company's fortunes and K-Tel was unable to meet the payroll. K-Tel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.^[4]

Mickey Elfenbein, Mr. Kives' nephew was appointed CEO of the publicly-traded U.S. entity K-Tel International in 1993^[5] Elfenbein remained CEO of the company into the late 1990s, during which period the company achieved a strong resurgence in worldwide sales primarily of music-related products and had a successful NASDAQ IPO trading under the symbol KTEL. Elfenbein was recognized by Business Week Magazine in 1994 as the CEO of the 7th best publicly traded company in the country, based on growth and profitability.^{[citation needed]}

The company earned significant revenues with a move into the music business, capitalizing on the business of releasing compilation albums that combined material from a number of popular artists -- "20 Original Hits! 20 Original Stars!" -- on a single theme album.^{[citation needed]} The company could earn significant revenue in this way, because they negotiated directly with artists and labels for the rights to reproduce their original recordings, in the process also securing a long-term asset through adding those recordings to their catalog.^{[citation needed]}

A lot of their compilation albums largely relied on the pop charts of the time - but concentrated on a specific musical genre - 20 Power Hits, for example, released in 1973, mostly concentrated on rock, though it had Yesterday Once More by The Carpenters on it. Some were made for the disco music market (Night Moves, 1979), whereas others had older stuff on them (Summer Cruisin', made in about 1976, but featured mostly 50s stuff).

During the 70's, the K-Tel compilation albums were as prolific as the "Now That's What I Call Music" collections of today, if not more so. Just a partial list of releases includes: 1975-Music Express/ 1976-Mind Bender, Power House, Block Buster/1977-Disco Rocket, Pure Power, Music Machine/1979- Circuit Breaker. There many others, and most releases had 18-22 songs per album.

Copyright issues aside, these albums were difficult to make cassette recordings of (assuming you were able to record directly from record to cassette without putting a mic up to the record player) for several reasons:

The recording quality deteriorated, due to them trying to get too many records on one album - artist albums of the time had about four or five tracks on each side, so, even with the hi-fi's faders (if available) set to maximum, it still sounded quiet;

It was also difficult to select tracks, as the albums were practically segued;

Also (quoting from the many albums this correspondent has seen over the years) "To ensure the best quality reproduction, the running times of some of the tracks, as originally released, have been changed."

This here means that, in order to get as many songs on as possible, the songs have been edited - usually faded down too soon or bits missing.

Most of the albums - particularly the ones with songs that were, at the time of release, currently in the charts, invariably topped the album charts (at the time, the album charts covered all albums - but they were later separated into artist and compilation album charts, once compilations started to proliferate.

The company also created original records, the most notable of which were the "Hooked On..." series, starting with Hooked on Classics.^{[citation needed]} In 1995, the company released the "Club Mix" dance compilation series, which became the highest selling music series in the company's history, with several RIAA Gold and Platinum certifications.^[6] The Club Mix dance series was created and produced by Elfenbein's son, Mark Elfenbein, who was VP of A&R for the company throughout the 1990s.^{[citation needed]}

Today, K-Tel remains one of the most well-known brands associated with TV marketing and the music industry, and the work of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in amassing an extensive catalog that may turn out to be particularly shrewd. The company is hoping to leverage their significant back catalog in a digital rights and distribution offering that supplies content to large online music retailers such as iTunes, Puretracks and Amazon.com.

[edit] Dot com Bubble's effect on K-tel

In mid-April of 1998 during the Dot com bubble, news that the company was simply expanding its business to the internet sent the thinly traded stock shooting from about $3 to over $7 in one day (3:1 split adjusted). In spite of the early gains, the company was deemed by many to be a complete bomb, and the short interest of the stock swelled. The price of the stock peaked at about $34^[7] in early May, and began to decline, reaching $12 in November and eventually pennies. The vicious advance was fueled mainly by a massive short squeeze that financially devastated traders who held short positions and were either "bought in" or simply forced to cover the positions at very high prices because of the great losses.^[8]

K-Tel were unable to sustain the growth and profitability. The company was taken private in a 1 to 5000 reverse split on July 18, 2007^[9] changing their symbol to KTLI and moving from the NASDAQ market to the over-the-counter market.

[edit] Trivia

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While K-tel was best-known for its "as seen on TV" records and products, they briefly dabbled in television programming and theatrical releases. At theaters, K-tel released at least two movies -- Kermit Schaefer's film about bloopers, Pardon My Blooper, and Mr. Superinvisible, a comedy-fantasy starring Dean Jones. On television, K-Tel also co-produced at least the first season of the musical children's series, "Kids Incorporated".

On SCTV, Dave Thomas played a character named Harvey K-Tel, an announcer who specialized in the loud patter typified by K-Tel commercials. His name was a play on the name of actor Harvey Keitel. In 2006, Thomas narrated a documentary film about the history of the company.^[10] K-Tel's albums were also satirized in numerous SCTV sketches, such as in the "5 Neat Guys" albums.