Unsung is a feature in which I take a look at a pop culture phenomenon (be it music, TV, literary, whatever) that has been forgotten or underappreciated. In this installment, I look at the Columbia House Record Club, which mass-produced records, tapes and CDs for generations with bait-and-switch offers.
If you're of a certain age (40+), you've likely heard of the Columbia House Record Club. In the early '80s, when I joined, it advertised in magazines like Parade with offers of 12 records for a penny. Of course, the catch was you had to buy several more at a marked-up price.
I signed up at age 14 in 1982 after we had moved to Washington state. You would receive a monthly mailing with a catalog and card featuring a record of the month, which the club would mail you if you didn't return the card within 10 days saying you didn't want it (or you wanted something else). Many kids would sign up under fake names, pocketing the records (or cassettes or later, CDs) and then signing up under a different name. I wasn't savvy enough to think of these tactics, so I just kept sending the card back.
There was a competing club run by RCA (which later became BMG) that I also joined. I used the clubs to build my music collection with older releases by bands like Led Zeppelin, the Who and Van Halen. Later, I got some decent deals on box sets by the Velvet Underground, the Clash and Robert Johnson. But basically the whole thing was a scam that lasted for decades.
The club used negative option billing, a practice in which services are automatically supplied to consumers until a specific cancellation order is issued. The practice was outlawed in Canada in 2005 and is still legal in 35 states (as of a few years ago).
Also, as it turned out, underage customers weren't legally bound to the agreement; sadly, I didn't realize this until much later.
Columbia House got its start in 1955 as the Columbia Record Club, formed by CBS/Columbia Records as a foray into mail-order sales. It grew so fast that the company moved its operations from New York City to Terre Haute, Indiana, where the company had opened a record pressing facility. Soon RCA Victor and Capitol Records also launched record clubs; each club sold only their label's releases at first.
In the 1960s, Columbia began clubs for reel-to-reel, 8-track and cassette tapes, with Columbia House becoming the overarching brand for the mail-order divisions. By 1975, there were more than 3 million members. In 1982, the CBS Video Club became part of Columbia House. In 1988, Sony acquired the CBS Records Group, which included Columbia House, which had 6 million members at the time. The corporate shuffling continued in 1991, when the CBS Records Group was renamed Sony Music Entertainment and half of Columbia House was sold to Time Warner, which added Time Life's video and music clubs, pushing the membership of Columbia House to 10 million.
After college, I started buying CDs like everybody else and realized they were a lot cheaper to buy used from record stores. I fulfilled my record club agreements and ditched them both in the early '90s, but Columbia House grew even bigger in the CD era. In 1994, Columbia House and other clubs accounted for 15% of all CD sales; two years later, Columbia House hit its peak at 16 million members. The clubs targeted customers in rural areas who didn't have access to record stores.
In 1999, Columbia House announced a merger with online retailer CDNow, which was struggling and had partnerships with Columbia House and its owners Sony and Time Warner. The merger was abandoned the following year as Columbia House's finances were having trouble and there was increased competition from a new retailer called Amazon.com. CDNow was then bought by Bertelsmann, which partially merged it with BMG Direct in a new venture called BeMusic. Amazon then took over CDNow in 2001; that year, music clubs accounted for less than 8% of all CD sales, which was attributed to competition from online outlets and big box retailers like Wal-Mart.
In 2001, a security breach in the Columbia House website exposed thousands of customer names, addresses and portions of credit card numbers. The following year, Sony and AOL Time Warner sold 85% of Columbia House to an investment firm called The Blackstone Group. There were rumors of a merger of Columbia House and Blockbuster, but that never happened. In 2005, longtime rival BMG bought Columbia House and merged it with the BMG Music Service, calling the new venture BMG Columbia House.
Of course, by this time, CD sales were plummeting thanks to the proliferation of digital music and file-sharing sites like Napster that allowed people to download terabytes of free music. Nobody was buying physical media anymore, let alone from a scammy record club.
Another investment firm, JMCK Corp. (the 2000s were the era of the investment firm; the company I worked was bought and sold by a few of them during that time) bought BMG Columbia House and changed its name to the uber-catchy Direct Brands. The music mail-order part of the club was shut down on June 30, 2009. Direct Brands continued to run a DVD and Blu-Ray Disc club under the name Columbia House; the club's owners filed for bankruptcy in 2015. There's a still a Columbia House website up, although it doesn't seem like it has been updated in a while.
Since the decline of the big mail-order music clubs, vinyl (and cassettes to a lesser degree) have made a slight return to popularity courtesy of hipsters. Artists like Taylor Swift and Adele have created a huge demand for their vinyl releases, so much so that pressing plants are overwhelmed by them and lower-profile artists have to wait to get their albums pressed. Rabid young fans often buy the records without having anything to play them on.
And there are even newer clubs springing up like Vinyl Me, Please that send a record of the month to members. Another popular option for many indie artists is to reissue albums on vinyl, especially 20th or 30th anniversary editions with bonus tracks.
In a music world dominated by streaming, it's nice to have physical media to turn to on occasion. I still have most of the records I bought from Columbia House and RCA/BMG (and even the cassette of Eddie Murphy's Comedian album; I only listened to that on my Walkman so my mom wouldn't freak out at all the swearing), so I guess I got my money's worth. Sort of.
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