Warning Stickers Seem to Hype Albums’ Appeal

Being banned in Boston never hurt a book’s chances of making the best-seller lists, right? It just piques people’s interest by making the book seem forbidden.

Some music retailers are saying that the same is true of record albums that carry parental advisory stickers. Under pressure from the Parents’ Music Resource Center, most major record companies agreed two years ago to put warning stickers on albums with explicit lyrics.

But instead of warning people off, the stickers are often red flags signaling to customers that the album is racy and provocative.

The top new entries on Billboard magazine’s pop album chart for the past two weeks have carried stickers warning of explicit lyrics. Both are rap albums: the Beastie Boys’ “Paul’s Boutique” and the D.O.C.’s “ No One Can Do It Better.”

“It’s very possible that by stickering, you attract attention and cause a frenzy to get the album,” said Gary Ross, executive vice president at the 700-store Musicland chain, based in Minneapolis.

Mitch Perliss, director of purchasing for the 50-store Music Plus chain, agreed that stickering doesn’t inhibit sales. “It probably even helps a little bit because it adds a little titillation,” he said.

But not all the attention the stickers attract is positive. Some department stores, including Target and K mart, refuse to stock stickered albums. As a result, record companies have to either forfeit those sales or come up with alternate versions of albums with the offending language deleted.

At stores carrying both versions, it’s no contest--and really no surprise--which one sells better: the stickered versions.

Chuck Lee, director of music buying for the 240-store Wherehouse chain, said that the “street version” of LL Cool J’s recent Top 10 album, “Walking Like a Panther,” has outsold the cleaned-up “radio version” by a margin of 10 to 1.

“We buy both and make both available, but our customer is telling us they like the hard-core version better,” Lee said.

Jerry Heller, an executive at Ruthless Records, which released the D.O.C. album, agreed that customer response is far greater to the original, stickered albums than to the toned-down versions. He based that conclusion on sales last spring of N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton” and Eazy-E’s “Eazy Does It.”

“We’ve gotten two negative calls from parents who bought albums not knowing that they had explicit lyrics and I’ve gotten literally hundreds of complaint calls from kids who have gotten the watered-down version thinking it was the real thing,” Heller said.

“I’ve got to believe there are more people out there that want the regular version than a clean version.”