Columbia House Is No More

It may have been how you started your music collection. It may also have been your first lesson in “sounds too good to be true!”

Columbia House, the mail-order music club that hooked us with the promise of a dozen CDs (or tapes or albums) for one penny is officially closing up shop.

A message on the website reads: “After 9/15/26, The Columbia House will no longer be accepting new orders. You can still purchase books with your credit card or credits as normal.”

Columbia House has been around since 1955, but really hit its peak in the 1990s, thanks to the compact disc craze. It was pretty easy to fall for what seemed like a good deal – you could join the club and get a starter collection of 12 titles for just one penny! Who remembers looking through the postage-sized stamps of album covers to pick out the 12 you wanted, and then put them on your order card? We specifically remember getting Hootie & The Blowfish, Goo Goo Dolls, and Beastie Boys through Columbia House in the mid-90s!

Problem is, after that, you had to keep ordering new music, usually a set number of titles, at regular Club prices. It was incredibly difficult to cancel and most of us ended up with some music we didn’t necessarily want. Columbia practices negative option billing, meaning they shipped music to the consumer until receiving a specific cancellation.

Columbia House took a lot of heat for its business practices, and shut down its music operations in 2009. Since then, it’s been selling DVDs, but that too has proved an unsuccessful business model.

We scrounged up this old commercial on YouTube – what a throwback!