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I think I remember seeing used CDs with a Columbia marking where the UPC would be, but not any other difference. Wasn't weighing the disc on a dope scale, though.
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I got a bunch of Columbia House tapes in the late 80s as a teenager and through my father's high-end Walkman they all sounded excellent. I have pretty perceptive hearing so if they were shitty tapes I would have known it.
The only problem I had with CH: nearly half the '1c' tapes they sent me weren't what I had ordered. The upside; I discovered a couple of my favourite musicians and band because of those fuckups.
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- Jan 15, 2019
If they were UPC-labeled, they were the exact same product already present at retail. Anything with Columbia House-specific SKUs (i.e. without UPCs on them) were unknowns. Often there was no metadata mismatch as far as track lengths/counts, etc., but that doesn't mean the audio itself was identical, and sometimes there were actual on-disc differences (you could expect not to get any extras, b-sides, or hidden tracks if they rolled their own "flavor" of an album). Not that I ever actually checked or even really paid attention, but I never noticed any obviously shitty audio quality from anything I got from them.
I don't think going "cheapskate" on the physical product (or its data content) was how they made their money anyway; CDs were already absurdly cheap to manufacture and ship, especially compared to audio cassette tapes. They made their money with the initial "offer" -- the "10 CDs for $0.01 each plus shipping, then just buy 6 more over the next 2 years at regular price!" thing. The list of discs eligible for that initial offer was short and was comprised mostly of older albums that weren't selling well anymore (so it was a bit of a clearance sale/loss leader); you'd almost never find anything brand new and chart-topping in that initial catalog. The "full" catalog you could choose from for those six full-price purchases carried everything they sold, and you could bank on anything even remotely recent or popular being full fucking price, upwards of $18 per disc even if you could get them for $13 or less at a local Walmart or Best Buy.
The other money-making element was the way the "club" worked in general. They'd mail you a card once a month naming the album they were going to send you unless you opted out by returning the card. If you didn't return it by the deadline, they shipped you the disc and included a bill (or charge your on-file credit card once it became more common for people to pay by credit card). You could return it (unopened) for a refund, but since shipping was at your expense both ways, it was rarely worth it and people rarely did that. They just ate the purchase and begrudgingly kept or disposed of the disc. Actually stiffing them took two years of diligently sending cards back every month, marked "I don't want this disc" and then ignoring their reminders to buy the discs you agreed to buy.
The bottom line was you still easily paid them a good $125-$150 to get the first ten discs and fulfill your six-disc full-price obligation, so it averaged out to about $8-$9 per disc overall, and we all know it never cost the industry nearly that much to produce an audio CD. They got their profit, cut out the big-box stores, and you got some music a little bit cheaper than in-store prices. People who stiffed them (i.e. they never bought the "full price" discs they agreed to) got sent to collections. They rarely (if ever) sued anybody, but they cheerfully dinged credit reports whenever they could. Of course, if you were under 18, they couldn't even do that, and had to write it off if you stiffed them.
Introvertigo
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Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja, Spanish man that was raised by wolves, died at the age of 80.
Introvertigo
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Nancy Kissinger, wife of Henry Kissinger, died at the age of 92.
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- Jul 18, 2021
From the end of the article.
Yes this was my experience as well, with both Columbia House and RCA (BMG) Music, and with both cassettes and cds. Sometimes they were labelled identical to retail, and sometimes they were stamped, e.g. "Mfd. for BMG Direct Marketing, Inc. under License." (I copied that from an early-90's cd I still have, lol.)
I never noticed a difference in sound quality either, but sometimes the song order was different, especially with cassettes from British bands. I remember noticing this with the Who, Genesis, Traffic, and probably a few others. When I later replaced all my tapes with cds, I had to get used to the "correct" song order. To this day my brain STILL expects "Who's Next" to run differently, because of the "wrong" running order on the cassette version I had.
In my case the joke was on them -- I loved that my initial order (in both clubs) was able to back-fill some earlier albums! Lol, even as a teenager I was autistic about having "the complete discography" from groups I liked.
The trick was to wait until they had their sales (which was like every other month), so you could take advantage of "Buy 1, Get 1 Free" or similar deals. RCA/BMG was better about this than CH, I remember great deals like "Buy 1 at full price, Everything Else $1.99", and I'd load up like half a dozen albums I'd been wanting. Even with shipping costs, it ended up costing way less than the local record store (this was pre-Walmart and pre-Best Buy).
Yes, this was a big deal! But at some point both clubs wised up and changed it to "Opt-In", you would ONLY get that month's selection if you mailed back the card.
Not true, at least where I live. I marked the box "RETURN TO SENDER - DID NOT ORDER" and the post office would ship it back at no expense. Although there was a handful of times when I would actually keep the tape/cd and pay for it -- very rare, since that meant I wasn't taking advantage of a sale. I remember one of clubs (probably RCA/BMG) would send a follow-up notice, "Hey you paid FULL PRICE for something, here's a certificate for a FREE selection (or two)."
Yes exactly. And it really was a good business model. Remember, they started this in the 50's with vinyl records, and it was very convenient to shop from home in the days before the Capital-I Internet. I'm sure they made money even on people like me who only bought when there was a sale. I ended up staying with both clubs for like 20 years, probably bought about 300+ cassettes and 250+ cds between them. My last purchases were in 2004 for CH and 2009 for BMG, I'm honestly shocked that Columbia House stuck around so long.
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- Jan 15, 2019
Yeah, it's a classic example of a business model that relies on people's impulsiveness and laziness to earn the lion's share of its profit, and it worked very well. They could afford to "reward" (with lower overall prices over time) the handful of people willing to pay full attention and "game" it since most people didn't. And as you said, they certainly never lost money on those "killer sales." The out-of-pocket price always worked out to being "cheaper than retail but higher than our cost to fulfill the order," so they were always in the black even with the enthusiastic bargain hunters.
It blows my mind how hard brick-and-mortar media retail truly shit the bed in the 90's. Stores like Media Play that focused on just selling tapes, CDs and DVDs couldn't match mail order's pricing or convenience (their costs were just too high to really ever be competitive on price) and they "pioneered" some of the obnoxious store policies that ultimately killed in-person media retail (like no refunds or even store credit for non-defective media returns if the package was opened, for example; sure, it was an anti-piracy measure, but it also meant "wait, so if this music just sucks I can't return it for a refund anymore?" which instantly killed any willingness to pay the "have it now" tax).
Instead of trying to emulate the classic small-town sole-proprietorship "music shop" where the staff actually knew something about what they were selling and dared to express opinions, it went full "standard-procedure retail shopping experience," complete with disinterested teenagers in public-facing positions and damn-near-Payola-scheme-tier marketing driving store layouts and product placement. The content cartel couldn't resist Payola-style schemes and so all brick-and-mortar retail stores for music, movies or television media became live-action billboards for the Current Content To Be Pushed™. Your preferences were irrelevant, your tastes ignored and the total fucks given for what you were hoping to find in-store when you visited was "zero."
That's not to say the "classic small-town" store experience didn't also suck (I generally didn't give a shit what the hippies or greybeards liked listening to either), but they were at least relatively knowledgeable about the product catalog available for sale.
But I still feel like it was their market to lose, and they did. By the time digital music downloads became the norm, it was as much due to the obnoxious brick-and-mortar "experience" as it was innovation and convenience that set up that market to thrive.
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- Jan 23, 2019
My parents were wise and would never buy a CRC offer for me, but every time I'd get the print ads in a magazine in the early 90s, I'd write every album I wanted on the little order form and just put it in my desk and fantasize about getting them. Glad my parents were smart enough to avoid the scheme.
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- Jun 11, 2014
I'm not sure whether my family ever bought tapes or CDs from Columbia House but we did use it for ordering videos in the early-to-mid-1990s, back when not every movie made it to physical media stores "priced-to-own", Columbia House was often the cheapest way to buy some movies instead of paying the full "priced-to-rent" price, which could be hundreds of (Canadian) dollars.
I remember buying a priced-to-own VHS copy of Wayne's World from a HMV store as soon as it went on sale in the summer of 1992 but a year and a half later, when Wayne's World 2 should've gone on sale, it was nowhere to be seen at HMV because Paramount didn't make the retail copies priced-to-own initially but Columbia House had it for a semi-reasonable price (not that I remember what that price was since it was 32 years ago).
My brother used Columbia House to buy the first couple of seasons of Babylon 5 as individual two-episode tapes because there was absolutely no other way to buy Babylon 5 until DVD boxsets came along a few years later. I think those initial Babylon 5 VHS tapes were literally Columbia House exclusives.
I remember buying a priced-to-own VHS copy of Wayne's World from a HMV store as soon as it went on sale in the summer of 1992 but a year and a half later, when Wayne's World 2 should've gone on sale, it was nowhere to be seen at HMV because Paramount didn't make the retail copies priced-to-own initially but Columbia House had it for a semi-reasonable price (not that I remember what that price was since it was 32 years ago).
My brother used Columbia House to buy the first couple of seasons of Babylon 5 as individual two-episode tapes because there was absolutely no other way to buy Babylon 5 until DVD boxsets came along a few years later. I think those initial Babylon 5 VHS tapes were literally Columbia House exclusives.
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- Jan 15, 2019
That show was fucking cursed, man. Even getting a good DVD collection at all was a fucking miracle. It's like the entire TV industry couldn't figure out how not to shoot their own feet off with such an obvious slam-dunk on their hands, which they consistently fucked into oblivion at every opportunity.
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- Mar 3, 2019
Actor Michael Wright, known for films such as The Five Heartbeats, shows such as Oz, and video games such as voicing Black Mask in Batman: Dark Tomorrow, has passed away.
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- Jan 15, 2019
Oh god he played Omar White on Oz. It takes a truly talented actor to make me fucking hate a character as much as I hated that one without also hating the actor (and he succeeded on both counts). RIP to a rare one.
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I'm fashionably late again, but I had no idea that Tom Noonan croaked in February, until last night. His death was kept as privately as it could be for a bit, but it was revealed he had cancer: https://www.facebook.com/FTLOHorror...this-morning-rip-tom-noonan/1225384303031082/
Crypt Kicker
kiwifarms.net
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- Jun 15, 2024
I had a mini panic attack because when you said Oz I thought of Harold Perrineau
I love that lil nigga like you wouldn't believe
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- Jan 15, 2019
Ah yeah Augustus Hill was a great character too. The rare "sane black voice of reason."
Omar White was a "good character" in the sense of being well-written and interesting; the actual quality of his character was dogshit, reprehensible, violent and simpering (essentially the modern stereotypical feral nigger), which made his portrayal impossibly difficult and why the actor impressed me so much for pulling it off anyway. He's wholly irredeemable, impossibly stupid and stubborn and incapable of growth, and just like with most useless niggers the one moment he "took a stand" for something stupid, thinking he was "doing the right thing" (as if defending a muslim is ever "right" or would ever be rewarded by said muslim), it got him immediately killed. Like literally overnight. Still a great portrayal though.
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- Aug 18, 2025
RIP A. Wyatt Mann.
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- Apr 28, 2021
Not to mention his biggest impact,
The happy Merchant meme.
That's right, Schlomo Shekelstein did not originated from some cartoonist in 1930s Germany or from some /pol/ user but from A. Wyatt Mann himself. Dude apparently had lifelong of strange friendships and connections over the years from Patton Oswalt to Jim Goad to the Transgender person in the infamous Obey The Walrus video.
I know certain types of people who feel the need to vent on how moral and better they are are going to see the news and either mock him or go on an escapade to condemn him to feel better about themselves. But honestly he accomplish more in life and left behind a bigger impact on our world than any of those types ever will. So who is laughing now?
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- Nov 11, 2023
RIP to a real nigga