The Verge:
There was a time in the not-too-distant past where you couldn’t just open Spotify, your favorite torrent client, or iTunes and get hold of a song you wanted to hear. No, you had to obtain actual physical goods that they sold in things called stores. That is, of course, unless you were a member of the Columbia House music club.
Mail-order convenience was big back then, and the idea of a subscription music service that came to your door was pretty appealing. But times change and mediums mutate, and now The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Columbia House has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It was an ugly ending. Revenues for Columbia House peaked in 1996 at $1.4 billion, but last year the company declared net revenue of just $17 million.
Living in the backwoods of Nova Scotia as a kid without much money and no access to a record store, Columbia House was the only way many of us could get the latest CDs and cassette tapes. And, getting 12 albums for a penny also may have been my first lesson in “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is”.
Good times! When I joined I ordered stuff I already owned on vinyl but had no way to tape. Then I got the same songs on Napster since I had no way to rip MP3s. I still have those cassettes in a box in my garage to make the MP3s legal.
Had dot laugh when I read this. I used to work in a record store. We sold used records. e were told never to take in used stuff from columbia House. They were identified with a different sky #.
Good times indeed!
Wow, you mean it was still around all this time?! Amazing they lasted into the 2nd decade of the 21st century.
Did they still offer 8-Track and Reel-To-reel tape options (as in the ad shown in the Verge article)?
Nail hit on head, Shawn. I never did it (my parents wouldn’t let me) but I always liked looking at all the little album pictures.
Wow. I remember seeing their ads everywhere, including National Lampoon magazine and most of the comics I read. Then I got a little older, and one of my early part-time gigs was typesetting on the night shift at an ad agency that did all the Columbia House print ads in QuarkXpress. Those layouts were so text-thread-fragmentary, only a few operators were allowed to even edit them.
I think my mother might have tried this service without understanding what the deal was, then cancelled it almost immediately when she realized that someone else would be picking everything. I think it was about ten years ago that I somehow got on their CD clearance email list, and loaded up on Cassandra Wilson music.
I got a lot of CDs form them and BMG back in the day. If you just did the initial offer and cancelled, you could join back in a year as a new customer again. I did this about four times total between the two companies and the cost per CD averaged less than 50% of the cheapest place in town.
Why were Columbia House records banned from resale?
I did it a few times, too. I didn’t mind the “Album of the Month” or whatever pick so much as long as I got my order card in time to decline it if I didn’t want it. The last time I joined it or BMG, I joined the classical music club so I could finally build up my collection of classical. Good stuff.
Spotify of the 80s! HA!
Argh, I’m old.