Long after hip marketing campaigns faded into painful memory, it remained the achievement of labels such as A&M that music had diversified its portfolio. The record industry had transferred its “serious” designation, in part, from classical and jazz to rock. Arguably, it had done poorest not by rock purists so much as by the MOR fans who confirmed or, as with the Carpenters, created its greatest sales achievements. At a time when African Americans used music to explore black power, country fans to modernize the South, and counterculturalists to draw boundaries across age, MOR fans were
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