Retroist Columbia House Podcast – The Retroist

Joining Columbia House was something I wanted to do long before I really understood how it worked. I remember filling out the forms for records and later CDs, then having my mom stop me before I could send them away. A couple of my friends actually belonged, and from where I was sitting they seemed to have figured out some secret way of getting huge piles of music for almost nothing. I mostly knew Columbia House through the catalogs and all the mail that came with them. At an age when I loved getting anything addressed to me, that alone gave the whole thing a lot of appeal.

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On the show, I start with the Columbia Record Club in the 1950s and how it grew into the Columbia House most of us remember. I get into the famous introductory offers, the monthly selections, and how the company could afford to send people so much music for so little money up front. Later I follow Columbia House through its enormous success with CDs and into the period when buying music online started making the whole system feel increasingly unnecessary. I also pull out a newspaper from when the club first appeared near me and look at what else was going on at the time.

What interests me most about Columbia House is how much I remember something I didn’t even get to try. The catalogs were everywhere and I spent plenty of time deciding which albums I would choose even though I was probably never going to send the form away. Columbia House managed to make ordering music fun (at least for me as a kid).

By the time I could have joined Columbia House without asking anyone, I had plenty of other ways to buy music. The company kept going much longer than I realized, first with music and later with movies, while the part of it I remembered had already faded away. I never got the stack of tapes or CDs for a penny that I imagined as a kid, but like millions of other people, I remember choosing them and I am sad those days are over.

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• This is the 371st episode of the Retroist Podcast and episode 22 of Season 18.

• My mother really scared me away from these types of offers, which must not have been easy for her since I was so persistent. I would guess that I completely filled out an order form at last every month for years hoping she would change her mind.

• I have found surprising 8-tracks for sale that seem to be very late releases. Almost all of them are from Columbia House.

• Getting mail was a much bigger deal to me when I was young. Even junk mail felt like somebody somewhere knew I existed, so Columbia House already had an advantage with me before I even opened the catalog.

• I always assumed Columbia House was mainly a 1970s or 1980s thing. I was surprised to find an ad for the Columbia Record Club in one of my local newspapers from 1955, right at the beginning of the whole operation.

• The little album cover stickers might be the thing I remember best. There was something very satisfying about physically picking out the albums and putting together an order on paper.

• I knew kids who joined Columbia House, so I was amused to find old consumer columns dealing with exactly that problem. Apparently enough children were signing themselves up that Columbia House had a policy for parents who called to cancel the membership.

• One man managed to use more than 2,400 fake identities to get over 26,000 CDs from Columbia House and BMG. The number of CDs is impressive, but I mostly keep wondering how he kept track of 2,400 imaginary people.

• Columbia House CDs sometimes get treated like strange second class versions of regular releases, but they were legitimate licensed pressings. There can be differences between individual releases, but there does not seem to be any general reason to assume a Columbia House CD sounds worse.

• The famous gold box was not just decoration. It was part of an advertising experiment designed to see whether people had encountered more than one Columbia House ad.

• There was a point when Columbia House and Blockbuster actually discussed merging. Considering how closely I associate both names with buying and renting entertainment in the 1990s, I would love to know what that company would have looked like.

• Bonus clippings will be over on Patreon soon for Supporters.

• Music on the show is, as always, by Peachy.

Thanks for listening to the show and I hope you have a great weekend.