Columbia Home, the mail-order music membership that after boasted it will ship you 12 albums for a penny, is alive in 2026 however not effectively.
The corporate’s web site introduced it’s shutting down September fifteenth. Whereas the times of 12 cassettes or CDs for one-cent, which finally rose to $1 for 13 and different comparable offers, to begin a membership have been lengthy gone, Columbia Home had remained open as a web based catalog membership for DVD and Blu-rays. However even that may quickly go the best way of the dodo. YouTube creator Channel 33 RPM gave a reasonably good explainer of the corporate’s rise and fall. Watch it beneath.
Columbia Home began out in 1955 as Columbia Report Membership, an experiment by Columbia Data to seize a share of the record-buying public by getting them to pay a membership charge in change for being despatched new information each month and having a selection of what’s despatched. The experiment labored, and by 1996, Columbia Home had 16 million members, in keeping with a historical past by FundingUniverse. However its gross sales declined by means of the late Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s as large field retailers and the web grew, together with on-line piracy of music.
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The corporate modified palms a couple of instances across the flip of the millennium earlier than being purchased by its major competitor and the dad or mum firm of BMG Music Companies, which additionally ended up promoting the enterprise. Chapter in 2015 landed the corporate within the palms of recent possession, which utilized the enterprise’ legacy to pivot into promoting DVDs and Blu-rays. A 2015 plan to make Columbia Home a vinyl supply service by no means panned out.
R.I.P. Columbia Home. That stated, Consequence wrote the identical factor in 2015. So, who is aware of what may occur.
