Originally Posted by
telekin
I actually wasn't referring to your comment about IABSB Ollie9, I was referring to a comment jobeterob threw out over HMM. Sorry for not being more specific.
I can't say exactly why it was not a bigger hit. There could be any number of reasons why a song doesn't reach the top, and I've never really used charts as a barometer of quality or to guide my listening. They're mostly snapshots in time to me.
That being said though, I think the fact that it gave them a nice little disco hit has to have counted for something. At that point in disco, so much of it existed outside of the purview of record label promotion still mostly still geared towards radio play, or even personal appearances - there was, in a sense, something pure and immediate about that.
To speculate a little bit - while there were already surprise disco hits, like Love's Theme by Love Unlimited Orchestra.. which became bestsellers because of disco and not radio, the industry at large had only just begun to harness the potential of the discos and the disco audience. There wasn't even a single disco chart yet in Billboard, and the first commercially available 12" single came out at least a year after Supremes '75 was released. So, while it didn't carry much momentum outside of the discos, HMM was enough to signal to the group and to the company that The Supremes still had a contemporary audience and some momentum to follow though on. And certainly, much of that contemporary audience consisted of their gay fanbase, which was also the core disco audience.
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