A story about Audio Cables (and bundling)

In honor of independance day, we are publishing a post from the founder’s own blog in honor of this country and it’s respect of free speech. We intend to publish an article from an individual every year around this time in the same celerbatory fashion. This article is intended to be fun an insightful, with the personal sentiments of the person reflecting their own opinion and not that of the entire corporation.

The below article has been heavily redacted to account for the founders colloquial style of communication (i.e. his potty mouth). If you want to read the full version with the expletives, you can do so at nickfreeling.com.

Audio Cable. Photo by Billy Joachim on Unsplash

I hesitated to write this because it’s going to make me feel like an old man. I don’t personally think of myself as old, but I do know some people who would say I am—which could possibly be evidence of when you are officially old. I think when someone is intelligent we recognize that pretty quickly, but I think wisdom has really gotten a bad rap, frankly, because the internet is an endless knowledge pool that has replaced every one of your grandma’s prized meatball recipes—but also because of this inter-generational conflict that was kicked off in early internet forums. What probably started as a bonding experience for the younger, more computer-savvy generation has metamorphosed into a marble of divisiveness in the culture we now have.

It’s almost cringey for my entire generation when our elders try to impart their wisdom; often it’s something we could have searched or was even common knowledge, or something we already knew like, “Hey, did you know if you put quotes into a Google search it searches exactly that phrase or word?” (cringe). But occasionally, it was a story that was never written, and the hardest part about this is our bull%#! sensors would go off so hard—because we hadn’t heard about it—that we would just write it off. That feels like the best way to describe the greatest weakness of our entire generation: we spend so much time dismissing our elders we may have missed a few important things along the way. That’s as close as you’re going to get from me to an olive branch, by the way.

For example, my dad frequently used to tell me giant fish stories or sailor tales. The fish he caught was the size of a man, he would swear, or the waves were as high as the houses. This isn’t abnormal; in fact, in oceanography they have a term for the way sailors talk about the ocean called “significant seas,” which is a combination of all swell heights—or the largest potential wave you can get. Basically, after years of dismissing fish stories about giant waves, there was some scientific backing to understanding why sailors would report a giant wave that seemed unrealistic, which is what happens when all swell heights “add up” into the occasional rogue-sized wave.

My dad would tell me about his time in the Navy when he was in the Persian Gulf and got into this heroic-sounding tangle with the Iranian military. When I was a kid, I blew it off as selective memory or my dad self-aggrandizing his time in the service. It probably didn’t help his case given the stories from the ’70s and ’80s about the Navy lifestyle—stories of taking drugs and getting lost on islands or people tripping so hard they would fall off aircraft carriers.

But it turned out to be true, and this short combat that lasted only a few days was called the Tanker Wars—and indeed, it actually happened, and this story was a firsthand account of an individual experience. I couldn’t believe it when I heard about it. I didn’t learn about it in school, I had never read about it, and just the other day I heard a story about Iran and had to look it up. I was shocked. I thought to myself, That crazy old coot was telling the truth. Or at least there was a nugget of truth somewhere in there.

So with that quick preface: this story is an article about an “As I saw it” moment in time, and thus, it is anecdotal. It’s not going to be as exciting to the general public as fighter-on-fighter pilot combat-rescue stories, but there is an audience out there somewhere like me that will find this interesting. All memory is anecdotal, but a lot of what I am going to write about here IS factually accurate. Some of it—specifically the numbers and some of the exact dates and years—are probably a little off. Stick with me, though, because the story matters, even through a soft lens.

When I was a kid, maybe 16 or so, I started working at music stores. I was a musician after all, and a teacher had just basically imploded, and there were a dozen kids that wanted a teacher—and at that age I was NOT ready for it at all. I had a bunch of different jobs as I moved around this place or that and at one point ended up working at a Sam Ash.

It was an utterly awful job—mostly because of the abysmal pay—but the actual commission structure, which was against a draw, was even worse. But the story I saw unfold is almost unbelievable in retrospect, and I had no idea how influential it would be—to the entire world.

I remember sitting at the register; it was hot as hell sometime in the summer. Even inside in the A/C it was still hot. My manager walked up and said, “We’re running this new promotion: anytime a customer spends (something like) $40, you’re going to give them this instrument cable for free.” The cable was interesting because it also had a lifetime guarantee, which meant you could return it if it went bad and just get a new one. The cables retailed for something like double the cost of a standard cable, but they felt terrible—they were impossible to bend or wrap. In my head I was thinking, Who is going to buy this %#!? No wonder they are giving it away for free.

Audio cables. Courtesy Cottonbro Studio from pexels.com.

At the time, the average order was something like $25, so for people to get over the threshold wasn’t hard. When you mentioned the promotion, people often said something like, “Well, what can I get for an extra $15 to hit $40?”

It seemed insane. I watched people literally buy an egg shaker (those little eggs you shake and it makes a maraca-type sound) or random parts or incredibly dumb knick-knacks and things they didn’t need just to hit $40 and get this cable for free. I mean, I got it: a free cable was always nice, and it’s just one of those things you always need. Either you left it at a friend’s studio or, worse yet, you go to play live and you get to a gig and suddenly the cable doesn’t work (an embarrassing story here for another time), or the cable starts going bad and starts popping and scratching and sounding like you’re on stage actively butchering a cat from the street outside.

I’m sure that the deal here, below the surface, was probably like cost or cost plus 10—or possibly even free to the store. Cables are cheap to manufacture and were high-margin, so it wouldn’t be a surprise either way.

Every time we made a sale, we would mention the offer, and it was almost always interesting—the customer would have us throw in some second item to hit the higher average order value. This would bring the order from one to two items, and the third was almost always one of these cables.

This meant that a third of the most common in-store order sizes were going to be this particular cable. This cable—just utterly alien both as a brand, in its design, and in its apparent quality at the time.

Fast-forward a few years. I had long ditched the in-store job and was professionally gigging full-time. I had enough money for rent without starving, and I could afford to buy gear occasionally. I remember stopping back into the old store I worked at to see if anyone I knew was still working, hoping to land a small discount of some kind. But no one would have recognized me; the whole staff was different—and it wasn’t really that much later, but that’s the sort of turnaround these places have.

I was shocked. The walls were crammed, front to back—the cables—they were everywhere.

I whispered a literal “what the %#!” to myself as I perused the cables section, desperately throwing items aside for a cable that didn’t feel like it was mid-boner and would actually wrap and stow in my guitar bag. They were everywhere. What the %#! had happened?

Well, here’s what the %#! happened. Despite these cables being, in my opinion and a few others I know—awful—some egg at corporate noticed that about one-third of almost every order was one of these cables, making it the most popular-selling cable in the entire store chain across the United States. It wasn’t just my store; it was all of them—everywhere. They had ordered a %#!load and put them in every crevice they could find. There was even a giant banner in your face basically just screaming the brand at you. Formerly, where there were dozens of cable brands to choose from, there was now mostly just one. Buying a cable was like worshiping at a megalith of a single-brand entity. It dominated the entire section, and there was nothing you could do. Do you want a different cable brand? %#! you.

(An aside here for the kids: this is before Amazon really started putting its %#! into everything. At this point it was mostly books, and it wasn’t what it is today.)

Audio cables. Courtesy Fox from pexels.com.

This cable company was, of course, Monster Audio. Now, I hope they don’t take my recollection personally, and in their defense I will add that a few years after this experience they gradually began making their cables a little more pliable. And the warranty was indeed very nice: you could just bring it back in—no receipt needed—and they would give you a new one. Pretty much every cable brand now offers some variation of this, and it sort of became industry standard if you wanted to compete in cable markets. But in my view, it was never the warranty. That indeed became the dragon everyone started to chase, but the credit goes to the act of bundling.

It doesn’t matter what store you run—if you have a product that becomes one-third of all products you sell, you’re going to notice, and you’d be stupid not to. And on top of that, the average order value was likely higher. Those are numbers worth celebrating.

But the story gets crazier, because there was another plot twist coming.

Fast-forward again (two fast-forwards right there—probably means I am old).

I had been working in tech for almost a decade at this point, and I remember going outside with my boss at the time, the CEO of the company. I had just cut this large deal, and he took me out in the morning for a coffee. It was really nice. He took some time to share with me some wisdom about running a business, starting a business—not this boomer-ish cringe stuff, but REAL genuine wisdom. Stuff like, make a customer feel rich and you have them for life. And then he told me a story, which I’ll get to after yet another brief preface:

At the time, a friend came over my house and he had a pair of Beats headphones by Dre. Bose was the champion then, unmatched with their QuietComfort series of noise-cancelling headphones. I remember arguing with him because I thought he was an idiot for spending such an absurd amount of money on headphones from Apple—it wasn’t even a music company—and the headphones just didn’t sound as good. They were certainly all right, but in my opinion there were better options out there, and certainly cheaper sans a ‘B’ logo. But they were everywhere, and for the general public that felt like the first major brand exposure to “nice” headphones somewhere between the $20 pair from CVS or the $100 professional recording studio headphones with a 1/4″ jack. You couldn’t go anywhere without seeing an ad for Beats; they were plastered on billboards and basically everywhere you looked.

A Pair of Beats headphones. Courtesy Deshmukh from pexels.com.

So back to the story. My boss tells me about a buddy of his who works in finance—and he’s telling me this because of the deal I just made. He said he had dinner with this guy once; the guy had two clients. One was Jimmy Iovine—a famous music name—and the other was, you %#! guessed it, Monster Audio.

Now at this point he wants me to focus on how this finance guy strikes the deal of his life, writes himself in for a percentage, and basically never has to work again a day in his life to leave me feeling proud of myself and inspired. He was a great boss. But in my head I can’t stop thinking—

Those mother%#!ers… Monster Audio?!?

I’m hearing this article I had read recently (referenced on this Reddit forum) out loud in my head and my heart is pounding. There was a story making the rounds about a group of audiophiles who listened to music carried through a coat hanger and a Monster Audio cable and they couldn’t tell the difference. I laughed when I read the article originally because of how I felt about Monster Audio, but then hearing this news—it was bowel-dropping, %#!-your-pants kind of shock.

It was hard to concentrate on what he was saying because I was having a completely different experience, but I refocused.

It’s true that this deal was plausibly the deal of the century within a certain niche (people who listen to music are a much larger group than people who play it) or at least for my generation had insane impacts on the products we consumed. What this guy did was introduce Monster Audio and Apple, and from that came Beats by Dre, the famous headphones that completely dominated the headphone world for almost a decade.

It was always about piggyback marketing, branding, and getting your brand together with other brands that people know. It was all about co-branding, and not even the brand itself. There was some symbiosis happening, and consumers and retailers—neither was in control. The warranty and the quality didn’t matter; it was coming whether you liked it or not. And you wanted it—it was a good deal. It was value like no other. It was free, and you needed it. It solved a problem. You even bought %#! you didn’t need just to get it. I always felt this was an incredible story, and I founded Propafly on the principle that brands are stronger together when we impact customers’ lives through additional value. It’s like getting hooked up because you know a guy at the counter and they give you their 10% employee discount. This kind of thing makes you feel famous—it makes you feel rich, or even special. All of this insanity I had experienced somehow turned into a grain of wisdom. It’s unfortunately a long story, though, and when I tell it I can almost see eyes rolling back because it really has to be the right audience. It’s very surreal to be old enough to have these moments where history is happening, and it’s almost so shocking that you lived through it you have to zoom out and question if it happened at all—or wonder if your memory is serving you correctly. But this is true, and it really happened. And as proof—I still have my egg shaker in my desk somewhere.