Maybe it's news to you that Columbia House was still operational in 2026. It was news to me, but that news is immediately invalidated by newer news: After 71 years, the longstanding mail-order media club is shutting down next month, as the YouTube channel Channel 33 RPM and website Cord Cutters News point out.
"After 9/15/26, The Columbia House will no longer be accepting new orders," reads a note posted to the Columbia House website. "You can still purchase books with your credit card or credits as normal."
Columbia House got its start in 1955 as the Columbia Record Club, a direct-mail marketing program by CBS/Columbia Records. New members were promised a free record for joining, and customers could bypass a trip to the record store by ordering albums to be shipped to them at home. It was such a wildly popular venture that by 1963, it represented 10% of the music retail market.
As the club spawned imitators, Columbia set itself apart by licensing titles from other labels, giving members a larger catalog to choose from. In the early 1970s, the name of the club was changed to Columbia House. It remained a powerhouse throughout the late 20th century, peaking at 16 million members in 1996, the same year the Columbia House website went live.
In 1991, Columbia's parent company Sony sold half of Columbia House to Time Warner, which merged the service with its own Time Life home video and music clubs. A merger with the online retailer CDNow in 1999 quickly fizzled out; CDNow was soon purchased by Bertelsmann and partially absorbed into the BMG Music club under the name BeMusic, only to be bought by Amazon in 2001.
As the market share for mail-order music clubs declined due to the rise of online and big-box retailers, Sony and AOL Time Warner sold 85% of Columbia House to an investment firm called the Blackstone Group. There were widespread reports of a planned merger with another doomed late 20th century titan, Blockbuster Video, but it never came to pass. Instead, in 2005 Columbia House was sold to its competitor BMG. After another sale to JMCK Corp. in 2008, the company rebranded as Direct Brands, shutting down music sales and continuing as a DVD and Blu-ray Disc club under the Columbia House banner. The Canadian branch of the company declared bankruptcy in 2010, followed by the American branch in 2015. Plans to launch a vinyl record club with Columbia House branding did not materialize.
As an undiscerning child, the service offered by Columbia House and BMG seemed impossibly cool to me. The introductory offer of as many as 12 CDs for a penny was enticing, and as someone whose musical horizons were rapidly expanding, I liked the idea of receiving a curated release of the month, even if sometimes it was preferable to opt out in favor of a different album. But paying for a new album indefinitely unless you opted out (a practice known as "negative option billing") turned out to be expensive, and Columbia House faced criticism for shady business tactics. Friend of the site Leor Galil recommends The Target Shoots First, Chris Wilcha's documentary about his time working at Columbia House.
