9 Weirdest Marketing Gimmicks Ever Used To Sell Music Albums

6. Rolling Stones Want You To Unzip Mick's Pants

When you're one of the biggest bands in the world and you have Andy Warhol designing your album cover, it's perfectly reasonable for things to get a little weird. That was the case when the Stones released Sticky Fingers in 1971. Suddenly, record store shelves were filled with rather large penis bulges encased in astoundingly tight jeans. That wasn't the most controversial part of the cover, though. Warhol decided to bedazzle the packaging with some functionality, including a real zipper overlaid on the image. When unzipped, the vinyl record beneath featured a cardboard insert (to protect the record from the metal zipper) that had a photo of the same man from the cover (Mick Jagger, supposedly) wearing underpants.

But the trouble with this creative packaging came from the zipper's tendency to ruin any album that was stocked IN FRONT of it on the shelves. Most often, this was another Sticky Fingers record, which meant that a large percentage of these albums were damaged on their backsides.