Flexi Disc - History

History

Before the advent of the compact disc, flexi discs were sometimes used as a means to include sound with printed material such as magazines and music instruction books. A flexi disc could be molded with speech or music and bound into the text with a perforated seam, at very little cost and without any requirement for a hard binding. One problem with using the thinner vinyl was that the stylus's weight, combined with the flexi disc's low mass, would sometimes cause the disc to stop spinning on the turntable and become held in place by the stylus. For this reason, most flexi discs had a spot on the face of the disc for a coin, or other small, flat, weighted object to increase the friction with the turntable surface and enforce consistent rotation. If the turntable's surface is not completely flat, it is recommended that the flexi disc be placed on top of a full sized record.

The Soviet-era "bones", "ribs" or "roentgenizdat" are so-called because one cheap, reliable source of suitable raw material is discarded medical x-rays, which have the added benefit of including ready-made and interesting images. The name roentgenizdat comes from the combination of roentgen ray (another word for X-ray) and izdat (Russian: издат, abbr. издательство, izdatel’stvo, "publishing house"), patterned after the word samizdat ("self-published", or underground literature). X-ray records emerged at the time of the Stilyagi as an underground medium for distribution of jazz music, which was prohibited in the Soviet Union after World War II. This format was also particularly attractive to politically suppressed punk rock music and the "do it yourself" punk ethic, since other publishing outlets were much less accessible.

Every year between 1963 and 1969, The Beatles made a special Christmas recording which was made into a flexi disc and sent to members of their fan club. While the earlier discs largely contained straightforward 'thank you' messages to their fans, the later Christmas flexis were used as an outlet for the Beatles to explore more experimental areas; the 1967 disc, for example, became a pastiche of a BBC Radio show and even included a specially recorded song entitled Christmas Time (Is Here Again).

In the late 1970s, computer programs encoded according to the Kansas City standard were distributed in form of so-called Floppy ROMs in magazines.

A two sided flexible sheet record of the underwater sounds produced by humpback whales was included with the January 1979 issue of National Geographic magazine. With a production order of 10,500,000 copies, it became the largest single press run of any record at the time.

While flexi-discs were usually just used as occasional giveaways, from 1980 to 1982, Flexipop Magazine made a speciality of giving away such a disc with each edition. Compact discs and the internet have rendered flexi discs largely obsolete but gimmick discs are still produced occasionally: Amelia’s Magazine included a one-sided Libertines flexi of What Katie Did

The American manufacturer Eva-tone, believed to be one of the last manufacturers of flexi discs, based in Florida, stopped production of the product in August 2000.

As of December 2010, Pirates Press, an independent record manufacturing company based in San Francisco, CA, has already begun production on flexi discs of various sizes and color.

In November 2010 extreme metal magazine Decibel began releasing flexi discs with each issue, starting with the January 2011 issue. The content on the disc features "100 percent exclusive songs" from artists that have been previously featured in the publication.

In October 2011, the Los Angeles based record company, Side One Dummy Records, teamed up with Alternative Press to offer a Title Fight flexi disc (containing 2 previously unreleased B-Sides) along with a year of AP subscription as a limited edition offer. Due to manufacturing delays the discs arrived packaged with the November issue of AP magazine in mid December.

On April 2 2012, Third Man Records released 1000 flexi discs tied to blue helium balloons into the air in Nashville, Tennessee. The discs contained the first release of "Freedom At 21", a track on Jack White's debut solo album, Blunderbuss. It is estimated that less than 100 of the discs will ever be found and they will be a valuable collectors item for many years.

On April 20 2012, Domino Records released a zine exclusively for Record Store Day that included five individual, multi-colored flexi-discs, each containing a song by Dirty Projectors, Real Estate, Cass McCombs, John Maus, and Villagers. The Dirty Projectors disc was previewed on April 19 by frontman Dave Longstreth via a YouTube video of him playing the record on a turntable.

In 2012 Rookie online magazine released its first hardcopy edition, Rookie Yearbook One, which contained a red flexi disc with two songs written specifically for the site; "I Don't Care" by the Dum Dum Girls and "Rookie" by Supercute!.