The top of an period has arrived within the mail — or, extra precisely, on a site. Columbia Home, the once-ubiquitous mail-order music and media membership, will cease accepting new orders after Sept. 15, bringing the curtain down on a 71-year run that helped hundreds of thousands of People construct their music and film collections one suspiciously cheap cargo at a time.
The corporate’s present web site says clients can proceed buying books with bank cards or present credit by the cutoff. The event was first reported by Twine Cutter Information.
The corporate traces its roots to 1955, when Columbia Information launched the Columbia File Membership as a technique to promote music on to shoppers, significantly these in rural and suburban areas with out easy accessibility to document shops. What started as a mail-order experiment turned a cultural power, ultimately increasing by vinyl, stereo gear, reel-to-reel, 8-track, cassette and, finally, CD.
After which got here the supply that helped make Columbia Home synonymous with the phrase “too good to be true”: eight CDs for a penny. As SPIN detailed in its 2021 historical past of the CD-club phenomenon, the catch was that members needed to buy a sure variety of albums at full membership costs, whereas undesirable choices may arrive routinely underneath the golf equipment’ famously aggressive negative-option billing system. Nothing in life is free. Particularly eight CDs for a penny.
By the Nineties, Columbia Home and rival BMG Music Service had been giants of the compact-disc period. Columbia Home reached 16 million members by 1999, with its monumental Terre Haute, In., operation using 3,500 individuals and processing a unprecedented quantity of CDs and movies. Contained in the operation, staff traversed a warehouse-sized maze of cabinets, strolling as a lot as 14 to twenty miles a day to satisfy orders.
At its peak, Columbia Home was not merely a technique to get music — it was a peculiar ceremony of passage. These mailers arrived in properties with more and more tempting gives, and a era of music followers discovered that the phrase “free” might be adopted by a number of paragraphs of very small kind. Certainly, the corporate would proceed to ship choices except members actively intervened.
The music membership ultimately succumbed to the identical digital forces that reworked the remainder of the enterprise. BMG acquired Columbia Home in 2005, and the music-mail-order operation shut down in 2009 as downloads and streaming eroded the marketplace for bodily albums. The Columbia Home title survived as a DVD and Blu-ray operation, later narrowing right into a a lot smaller direct-to-consumer enterprise.
Now even that final remnant goes away, however someplace, presumably, there’s nonetheless an unopened Columbia Home bill ready to be paid.
