Columbia House to cease operations on September 15th after 71 years

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Remember when you could get seven records or 8-track tapes for a penny or 12 cd’s for that same bargain-basement price?

The original subscription music service, which came decades before we had streaming subscriptions, is going the way of the 8-track.

Columbia House is shutting down after seven decades.

Columbia House—which, through the program once widely advertised as the Columbia Record Club, was the brief boon, and eventual bane, of the wallets of many a low-budget music seeker—is officially shuttering its mail-order business. (Which switched over to exclusively selling and shipping movies several years back, for those of you not up-to-date on the mail-order game.) Per NPR, the company’s web site now carries a notification that “After 9/15/26, The Columbia House will no longer be accepting new orders.”

Those orders are going to be pretty skimpy, too: The company’s web site currently offers only 12 “new releases,” most of which are already several years old

The actual business provenance of Columbia House is a long and convoluted one, meanwhile, starting with what would eventually become Sony Music Entertainment back in 1955, before winding through a long stream of bankruptcies and sales.

In its day, though, Columbia House was both famous and infamous for its ubiquity and its introductory offers that “sold” a dozen CDs for a penny—while also putting those new members on the hook to buy many more at regular prices, unless they could work out the arcane rituals necessary to cut themselves free. Referred to as “negative-option billing,” this practice bilked god knows how many teenagers (or, more specifically, their parents) out of massive amounts of money over the years while also, admittedly, helping to build out America’s CD collections in pretty spectacular fashion.

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