Let’s pause for a moment to remember the soon-to-be-extinct Columbia House Record Club
[This was my weekly column for GlobalNews.ca. – AC]
If you’re of a certain age, you’ll remember ads and newspaper inserts from the Columbia House Record Club promising an unbelievable deal on records and tapes. We were told we could have seven/eight/11/12/13 albums from a long list of them for just a penny. One cent! That used to be the price of a single piece of Hubba-Bubba bubblegum!
Fantastic! An instant record collection practically for free! All you had to do was agree to buy a certain number of albums over a specified time at regular club prices. The trick was you didn’t get to choose which albums those were. That meant you were often stuck buying a record you didn’t care about. And they were often big into negative option billing, meaning albums kept coming unless you cancelled.
There were other downsides, too. Record club vinyl often wasn’t as, er, robust as the records you bought in stores. And while labels loved record clubs because they juiced sales numbers, artists did not. Many contracts contained clauses that said any records part of “12 for 1 cent” promotions were ineligible for royalties.
All of the above is moot because Columbia House, the most famous of the record clubs, is closing on Sept. 15. This marks the end of a 71-year-old business that’s been around since 1955.
