I'm Jason Toon and I love music and sports. So why can I only collect trading cards celebrating one of those enthusiasms? Return with us now to the thrilling days of yesteryear in this Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell, to answer that question… It seems like a natural fit: trading cards but for music instead of sports. They're both photogenic forms of entertainment, showcasing dynamic performances in colorful outfits. Bands are like teams, with flashy, charismatic stars supported by anonymous but indispensable role players. Obsessive music and sports fans both define themselves by loyalty to their chosen act or team. And most importantly, they both buy a lot of merchandise. That's what several trading card companies thought in 1991. That year, they went all-in on music trading card sets that matched the scope, comprehensiveness, and attention to detail of big-league sports cards. They weren't the first music cards, not by a longshot. But they were the fullest attempt yet to test the theory that music fans would buy cards as avidly as sports fans. So how'd it go? Spoiler: none of those card lines issued a new set in 1992.
Commerce makes for strange cardfellows. 1991: the year packs broke "Music as an industry is bigger than any single sport," Victor Shaffer, marketing vice-president of the Pro Set card company, told the Detroit Free Press in 1991. Shaffer noted that music merchandise sales added up to $23 billion the previous year, his hunger for a piece of that feast practically dripping off the page. There'd been music trading cards before, of course. But they tended to be focused on an individual act like Elvis or the Monkees. Or they were small sets of a couple of dozen cards, often as a giveaway with a food product. Or they were European. Maybe we'll cover them in a future Shoddy Goods - point is, none of them were quite what we're talking about here: music cards that tried to capture the full spectrum of what was going on at the moment, the way a sports card set is a record of a particular season. By 1991 Pro Set was riding a high, as was the whole trading card field. The old Topps-dominated industry, selling cheap packs to kids at corner stores and supermarkets, had exploded into a very grown-up, collector-dominated, speculative industry. Some 10,000 sports card shops opened up across America to peddle the wares of a dozen new manufacturers. Pro Set was one of them. Soon after their 1988 founding, they landed a particularly sweet deal as the first-ever "Official NFL Card". This gave them access to the league's proprietary photo archive, and the cards were marketed by the league itself. At 800 cards, their 1990 edition was the biggest football set ever produced, and it was printed in the millions. Pro Set didn't do "small". And so their 1991 debut run of SuperStars MusiCards would likewise dwarf all previous music card sets in both size and ambition. Pro Set teamed up with Winterland Productions, one of the biggest music merchandising outfits, to license their roster of artists. These 340 cards roamed far and wide over the contemporary pop charts, from megastars like Madonna and George Michael to passing fancies like MC Skat Kat and Information Society. But it didn't stop there (good call given that 1991 was one of pop music's worst years).
The '80s were over but the '90s hadn't started yet. The surreally mind-boggling array of acts spanned the teenie-bopperist pop (Debbie Gibson) to the most thuggish hardcore punk-metal (Cro-Mags) and all points in-between. A "Legends" subset included dorm-room standards like Led Zeppelin, Bob Marley, and the Doors while other defunct-but-not-forgotten acts were scattered throughout, from the Ventures to the Clash. And if that wasn't exhaustive (or exhausting?) enough, Pro Set issued an additional hip-hop set endorsed by and named after Yo! MTV Raps, the show that brought hip-hop to the white suburbs. These 150 cards took a similarly expansive approach, from easygoing novelty acts like Biz Markie to the militant Public Enemy. Pro Set must have thought they'd conquered music like they had the NFL. The stage gets crowded But other companies were getting in on the act. Brockum Group, the biggest rival to Winterland Productions in the music merch game, issued Rock Cards. These 288 cards focused on artists with big amps and bigger hair who were conveniently on the Brockum licensing roster. "The hard rock and heavy metal (acts) appeal most to people who buy anything in merchandise or souvenirs in music," Brockum's Allen LeWinter said in that same Detroit Free Press story. "The MC Hammers and Madonnas don't sell merchandise. It's the Mötley Crües and Alice Coopers and those bands." For Rock Cards, that meant anything from thrash like Anthrax and Megadeth, to pop metal like Poison and Cinderella, to the goth Sisters of Mercy, to the multiplatinum-gilded Bon Jovi. If you can picture the band name as a patch on a grubby denim jacket, it can play in the Rock Cards league.
AquaNet is a hell of a drug. I give Rock Cards props for being the only one of these sets to treat the bands like teams and the players like, well, players. There are group cards and then solo cards for everyone in the band, often two or three for each band member. Make room on your knick-knack shelf, superfans of Winger drummer Rod Morgenstein! Another challenger to Pro Set came from a hip-hop direction. Premier Rap Pack was a 150-card set that, like the Yo! MTV Raps cards, featured a range of artists who'd probably never share the same bill, or even appear in the same record collection. Overall, it's got more street cred than the Pro Set lineup, with the likes of NWA and Too Short, but there's also room for Kid-n-Play, Salt-n-Pepa, and an absolutely hilarious young Vanilla Ice wannabe named Kid Rock. Yeah, that Kid Rock. Add it all up and that's 928 individual music trading cards released in the United States in 1991. Licensing issues meant that none of these sets were really comprehensive: no Michael Jackson or Prince, nary a Rolling Stone nor a Guns 'n' Rose. But they were still the biggest, most diverse, most professionally produced sets of music trading cards ever, all hitting the market at the same time. “Now most of it is worthless” As it turned out, the wrong time. We don't know how well these cards sold. But if they had sold like gangbusters, there would've been more, right? There weren't more. Like all those fevered speculators whose retirement plan was a garage full of Gregg Jefferies rookie cards, Pro Set and Brockum got in just as the boom was peaking. Trading card sales dropped from $3 billion in 1991 to $1 billion in 1994, and kept dropping. Thousands of card stores closed. "There's been a dramatic contraction in the sports card market in the last couple of years," Topps chairman Arthur Shorin Jr. admitted to the New York Daily News in 1994. To this day, mountains of unwanted cards from the "junk wax era" still turn up in thrift stores, garage sales, and Dumpsters. Pro Set fell first, hard and fast. They'd boomed by flooding the market, paying top dollar for their exclusive NFL and NHL licenses, printing cards in the millions. When everyone suddenly realized that what made old cards valuable was their scarcity, and all these mass-printed new cards were just pieces of cardboard, Pro Set went bankrupt in 1992, the first of many casualties of the junk wax collapse. "They just went nuts," said analyst Jeff Kurowski at the time, to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. "Anything they could produce, they did. They would just spit it out and now most of it is worthless." Brockum, for their part, ended their card experiment after Rock Cards and stuck with t-shirts. They were bought out in 1997 by another music merchandiser, Nice Man. To this day, an original Brockum tag is a sure sign of authenticity on a vintage rock t-shirt. The tags themselves have even been counterfeited.
Pictured: groundbreaking, timeless hip-hop innovators and Kid Rock. No US company in all the years since has attempted a truly full-scale, current, mass-market music card set. Maybe if MusiCards and Rock Cards had shown up five years earlier, they could've built enough momentum to survive the industry collapse. Or maybe not. Grunge and gangsta rap would soon blast the already fragmenting music audience of 1991 into smithereens; the rise of the Internet would keep them from ever fitting back together. Ultimately, maybe the problem was that sports and music fandoms are only superficially similar. Sports teams have roots going back decades, with fandom passed from parent to child to grandchild; popular music acts are inherently bound up with their time and generation. Most sports teams can't exist without opponents, so you get to know your enemies, even develop a grudging respect for them; but who would want a little picture of some band they don't like? I could bond with my Dad over our hatred for the Chicago Cubs. But he was the only one who listened to Chicago. It’s so weird to imagine being in a band and getting your own trading cards. I mean, what would that even be like? —Dave (and the rest of Meh) If you like this kind of thing, sorry, we've got lots more. Better call in sick to work:
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