You see little holes drilled through the label on many 45rpm records - what are they?
The US record industry worked on a consignment, or sale or return basis. Record distributor salesmen would go around to the record shops in their territory and get the owners to place orders for new releases. Shops would agree to 'order' records, but this really meant they were agreeing to take them on consignment - if the records did not sell by the time the invoice came due - they could send anything back from the invoice that had not sold. They could keep records if they wanted but had to pay for them so most shops would send them back and just pay for the records that had sold.
Once the distributor got the records back, they would hold them until they had to pay for them, then do the same thing - send back what hadn’t sold to the label and pay for what did. Once the labels got these records back - they would sell them to 'cut out' distributors who had their own network of shops that would sell them at drastically reduced prices.
So how could they mark them so that a shop could not buy these cut out records, then sneakily add them to their returns to their distributors? LPs could have a corner cut off the cover without damaging the vinyl (hence the term "cut out") but 45s were not sealed so this would not work. The labels found that by drilling through the box of 45s somewhere around where the label would be (with a drill, or hot rod), the record could be marked, (usually) undamaged, and the mark could not be removed. The term BB was adopted, because it looked like someone had used a BB gun to shoot the record.
So, the BB hole is just an indicator that a record did not sell when originally sent out to shops on its initial release, and probably why these BB holes are more common on these rarer records we collect.
