bby hotline (2023)
Although released just a year ago in 2023, the very first 2000-indie-rock-guitar-riff on bby’s “hotline” could probably convince a good number of listeners that it was produced roughly 20 years earlier. If it had been, the song title combined with the steamy lyrics would probably have been interpreted in the context of a phenomenon of the naughts that has since become a thing of the past:
It started a good few decades ago in the 1980s, when US phone companies started offering pay-by-the-minute 900 numbers. Yes, we are taking quite a leap here, but stay with us. So in the early 80s, a woman called Gloria Leonard, a former adult-actor-turned-editor of the porn magazine High Society, purchased one of these 900 number plans to promote her magazine: She recorded messages on what customers could expect in the next issue and let these updates play at the number like an answering machine message. Needless to say, people called. So she had other adult-film stars record similar messages, and from there, the format became popular in both the US and the UK.
By 1988, US citizens paid a total of 2 billion dollars per year to listen to pre-recorded erotic messages that played on phone-company-owned 900 numbers—a business just as lucrative for these phone companies as for the erotica industry itself. Well, all through the dawn of live calls available on these same numbers in the 90s at least before the US banned 900 numbers and put an end to this specific business model in 2004. And so, here we are—and now we agree that in an alternate universe, “hotline” definitely is 2000s-indie-band bby commenting on the recent ban of phone sex hotlines, right?
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