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Columbia House, the Spotify of the '80s, is dead
By Bryan Bishop on August 10, 2015 05:13 pm
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.
Columbia House offered you Incredible Deals™ when you signed up: you'd get a bunch of free albums for a penny, and in turn you promised to buy a set number of albums over the coming year. (To make things easy for you, Columbia House would automatically send you some albums unless you told them not to.) 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. Hell, it hadn't even been in the music business since 2010.
But I'm not here to cry for Columbia House. I'm here to remember.
I'm not sure where I first heard of the service, but I do know what finally pulled me in was an ad in
TV Guide. It was a fancy, fold-out ad, probably with "1 cent" in big red letters. That penny was the only thing you'd need to pay to get the first collection of eight records (10 if you took advantage of the bonus albums!), and my pre-teenaged self couldn't get over the incredible bargain. I'd pore over the rest of the ad — literally just a list of artists and album names — like I was Ralphie in
A Christmas Story, entranced by the potential and wonder.
I'd perused them before, but the problem was I could never really find enough albums I wanted to fill that initial order. That was the trick with Columbia House; due to the agreements in play, they actually didn't have records from everybody in the world. Columbia House was founded by Columbia Records, and competing services offered competing selections, though Columbia House was always the frontrunner in terms of marketing exposure, in my young eyes. Eventually all the pieces came together and I pulled the trigger. I couldn't tell you exactly what I ordered, but
I'm pretty sure Madonna's Like a Virgin and a Huey Lewis album were involved. What can I say; it was the '80s.
And
that first shipment of cassette tapes was like Christmas. I ripped open the rigid cardboard packaging, and was instantly a music connoisseur with a burgeoning collection that I could slip in and out of my Walkman as I desired. Columbia House didn't just give me enjoyment; it gave me freedom. Empowerment.
Agency. (Please disregard that my parents were paying for the whole thing.) This was America at its finest.
But that high of consumerism was fleeting, and soon I found myself with music homework. As it turns out, finding subsequent albums to buy was as difficult as choosing the initial batch. It just became easier to let the pre-selected albums come in — imagine U2's
Songs of Innocence, but it's a cassette tape that shows up at your house and you have to pay for it. When that initial obligation was up, things didn't get any easier. Canceling Columbia House was notoriously difficult, and finally getting rid of the service was
my first young lesson in the dangers of using your parents' credit card. (It was later bested by the $500 I spent calling a
Total Recall 1-900 number in the hopes of winning a leather jacket, but one step at a time.)
Columbia House, my nostalgic heart will miss you. You taught me how much fun it was to buy music, and you taught me to avoid mail-order offers at all costs. In a way, you were the good and the bad of capitalism, all wrapped up in one shiny
TV Guide ad. May the sounds of Huey Lewis and The News usher you gently into that good night.
http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/10/9127703/columbia-House-mail-order-music-streaming-nostalgia
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