Why America once cut records from cornflakes?

I was reading in today’s New York Times about a curious piece of music history. In the USA, during the 1950s to 70s, breakfast cereal companies printed gramophone records directly on their carton boxes and gave them away free. Imagine cutting out a Beatles or Boney M record from your breakfast box and playing it at home. The article said they sounded bad, but for kids of that era, the joy must have been incredible. Remember, there were no Spotify, iPods, CDs, oreven cassette players in those decades.

The NYT piece called these “ephemeral records”, stamped on thin plastic stuck to the cardboard. For the cereal makers, this was the perfect trick to sell more boxes, and for children, it was magic. The Monkees, Jackson 5, and even the cartoon band the Archies had their songs pressed onto cereal boxes. Parents may have frowned at the sugar content in the cereals, but kids would have cared more about whether the back of the box had a new song to cut out and play.

These records were fragile, unlike proper vinyl. Most would have got scratched, warped or thrown away once they stopped playing. Yet, I read that a few collectors in the US still treasure them, saving what was never meant to survive. That line struck me. It reminded me of my own childhood in India, with the small stack of LPs we had at home. By the time I was growing up in the 1980s, cassettes had taken over, but we still had a gramophone player and discs. I remember gently placing the needle on the record, the hisses and crackles adding to the charm. The whole ritual of picking up the needle and balancing it on the groove was part of the magic.

We never saw anything like cereal box records here. Cereals themselves were not a big part of our diet then, and promotions like these were unknown. As a boy, I would have loved to get a surprise record with my breakfast. Even if the sound was bad, the thrill would have been worth it. Did anyone in India ever come across something similar? I certainly didn’t. Some ideas remain locked in time and place, but they tell us how inventive people were in creating joy out of simple things.