I got a lot of great albums from Columbia House.
It’s hard to call this a sad day because the old-school Columbia House that helped to fill the record libraries of a previous generation has been dead for a decade - and irrelevant for longer still - but even so, it’s sort of a bittersweet reminder. As it happens, a couple months back, the AV Club did a great roundtable with some folks who wrote blurbs for the old Columbia House catalog (one of whom was Sasha Frere-Jones!), which is definitely worth reading.
Seems like bankruptcy was the right call. Rolling Stone has the figures in full, but basically, the service peaked in 1996 with profits of $1.6 billion, but as of this year, it has assets worth $2 million and debts of $63 million. Interestingly, BMG obtained Columbia House in 2005, at which point Columbia House was rebranded as a mail-order DVD club. The competing mail-order provider of the era - the BMG Music Service - called it quits in 2009. And regardless of whether or not you agree with him, you’ve GOT to respect his use of the word yearning in that sentence. You can see a yearning and an interest to try a new format, Lippman said. I’m actually shocked by this - not shocked to learn that Columbia House is going out of business, but shocked to learn that Columbia House was still in business at all. Well, his name is John Lippman, and he recently purchased Columbia House for a cool 1.5 million. In any case, it appears I’ve outlived my creditors, because today, the Wall Street Journal reports that the owners of Columbia House have filed for bankruptcy. I’m still not sure if I’m on the hook for those lapsed memberships, to be honest. I was afraid my negligence would one day prohibit me from buying a home I was relieved, however, by some probably inaccurate urban legend spread among my classmates claiming that you couldn’t be prosecuted for such contract infringement if you were under the age of 18 when you signed the deal. I joined the club several times over, and I think I lived up to the terms of the agreement once. If you were there, you remember it well if you weren’t, it must seem impossibly archaic. This is how it worked: You started off getting eight CDs or 12 cassettes for a penny, and then had to buy a bunch more at some obscene markup. Any music head who came of age in (or around) the ’80s was at some point a member of the Columbia House mail-order record club.
0 kommentar(er)
