Columbia House faces the music
Once-popular mail-order club ends decades of deals and debt collection
By: William Westhoven
NorthJersey.com
USA Today Network - New Jersey
..... A few months ago, my baby boomer inner child could not resist a novelty T-shirt I saw Online. It read "Columbia House: Life Lessons in Music and Debt Collection." If you know, you know. If you don't gather 'around the turntable, millennials and Gen-whatevers, and let me spin the tale of how a generation of young music lovers was seduced by the lure of 12 long-playing records for a penny. Such was the historic promise of the Columbia Record Club, a marketing experiment rolled out by Columbia House (aka Columbia Records) in 1955 to sell its vinyl inventory to the pubic.
..... Or cassette tapes. or 8-trakcs, depending on how you rolled in the glory days of classic rock, smooth jazz and soul, easy-listening orchestras, Broadway crooners and the latest comedy from America's favorite funnyman, Bill Cosby. For a time, you could even get your favorite titles on reel-to-reel tapes.
..... Sooner or later, we all learn that if something seems too good to be true, it prop baby is. some of us learned the hard way, at an age when our financial options were mostly limited to Christmas club accounts at the local savings and loan.
.....
The pitch could be seen in magazines: Choose 12 LPs from a long list of artists, tape a penny (really) to the order form and send it in. Even better were the mailers that would include images of the records on little stamps you would tear off and affix to the order form (with the penny), before mailing it in the prepaid, pre-addressed envelope.
..... No credit cards, age restrictions, passwords or two-way identification needed. Just don't drop it in the mail and join the club. A few weeks later, your new stack of wax would arrive in a corrugated-cardboard box.
.....
For a kid like me, who started collecting record at age 12, skimming through the racks at Two Guys, Korvettes and the Harmony Hut at the new Willowbrook Mall, Columbia House was the ultimate enabler. Once I got my first stereo, a tinny GE Mustang with plastic speakers, I vowed someday to accumulate the wall of records I saw in a magazine ad for my favorite raid station, WNEW-FM.
..... Columbia was my gateway drug to a lifetime habit. I now have my wall of records, some 6,000 LPs and 1,000 45s (to the kids, 45s are small records, not firearms). These days, the joke is I'm the only homeowner in the neighborhood with vinyl siding inside and outside.
..... But the dark truth is - as it may well be for you - I still owe money to Columbia House.
..... Of course there was a catch! The back end of the deal was your contractual obligation to purchase a certain number of records from the club over he next few years. The stakes varied from time to time, but usually it was 10 to 12 records over two or three years, an eon to a music-hungry tween.
..... And at 12 records for a penny, who reads the fine print? The outlined a process whereby they wound send you a form announcing the "record of the month" that would be mailed to you unless you sent back a rejection postcard. Miss the deadline and you might end up with a record by the Ray Conniff Singers or the Doodletown Pipers, which you wouldn't be caught dead listening to.
..... Ever worse, the records you brought from Columbia House were sold at full retail price, with postage attached to the transaction. Inevitably, we would-be Columbia scam artists would find ourselves in arrears, lie a junkie to his pusher, and caught in a vicious cycle of threatening collection lett4ers we had to keep our parents form intercepting.
..... I learned my lesson well and keep a tight grip on my finances. But back in the day, intoxicated by the sheer audacity of the Columbia come-ons, some of us kept going back for more, surreptitiously signing up our pets, grandparents and imaginary playmates.
.....
I committed the one-penny opera at least three times ... and admit it, so did you, at least once or twice. I later learned that the Columbia House business model was known as "negative-option billing," which turned out to be as ominous as it sounds. The records they offered (or sent) were often leftover copies of older records that had fallen off the charts, and they had ways to denying royalties to the artists for the free record deals.
.....
So, at the end of the journey, they made a tidy profit of most of their club members and got to write off the rest. At tis peaks in 1996, Columbia House reported revenues of about $1.4 billion, a CNN report said. I would say I came out ahead in the game, but not without some-angst, guilt and fear they would eventually come for me like the paper boy in the movie "Better Off Dead," chasing me and shouting, "I want my two dollars!"
..... I know that some of you, faced with the announcement that Columbia House will shut down forever on September 15, [2026] are asking, "Is that really still around, still a thing?" The answer is yes, well, sort of, but not really.
..... The Columbia House death spiral is a maze of mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies. The Columbia House name is currently owed and licensed by Sony Music entertainment. Mail-order sales of records ended in 2009, DVDs and Blu-rays were hawked for a time. We all know what happened to the market for those formats.
..... So Columbia House will fade quietly into history. But for some of us, the soundtrack of our lives will always be connected to its memory.
..... As for the pennies ... they don't make them anymore, either.