The end of an era has arrived in the mail — or, more accurately, on a web site. Columbia House, the once-ubiquitous mail-order music and media club, will stop accepting new orders after Sept. 15, bringing the curtain down on a 71-year run that helped millions of Americans build their music and movie collections one suspiciously inexpensive shipment at a time.
The company’s current site says customers can continue purchasing books with credit cards or existing credits through the cutoff. The development was first reported by Cord Cutter News.
The company traces its roots to 1955, when Columbia Records launched the Columbia Record Club as a way to sell music directly to consumers, particularly those in rural and suburban areas without easy access to record stores. What began as a mail-order experiment became a cultural force, eventually expanding through vinyl, stereo equipment, reel-to-reel, 8-track, cassette and, ultimately, CD.
And then came the offer that helped make Columbia House synonymous with the phrase “too good to be true”: eight CDs for a penny. As SPIN detailed in its 2021 history of the CD-club phenomenon, the catch was that members had to purchase a certain number of albums at full club prices, while unwanted selections could arrive automatically under the clubs’ famously aggressive negative-option billing system. Nothing in life is free. Especially eight CDs for a penny.
By the 1990s, Columbia House and rival BMG Music Service were giants of the compact-disc era. Columbia House reached 16 million members by 1999, with its enormous Terre Haute, In., operation employing 3,500 people and processing an extraordinary volume of CDs and videos. Inside the operation, workers traversed a warehouse-sized maze of shelves, walking as much as 14 to 20 miles a day to fulfill orders.
At its peak, Columbia House was not merely a way to get music — it was a peculiar rite of passage. Those mailers arrived in homes with increasingly tempting offers, and a generation of music fans learned that the phrase “free” could be followed by several paragraphs of very small type. Indeed, the company would continue to ship selections unless members actively intervened.
The music club eventually succumbed to the same digital forces that transformed the rest of the business. BMG acquired Columbia House in 2005, and the music-mail-order operation shut down in 2009 as downloads and streaming eroded the market for physical albums. The Columbia House name survived as a DVD and Blu-ray operation, later narrowing into a much smaller direct-to-consumer business.
Now even that last remnant is going away, but somewhere, presumably, there’s still an unopened Columbia House invoice waiting to be paid.
