R.I.P. Columbia House: Here’s How It Improbably Survived This Long

Right now, if you go to the website of Columbia House—yes, it has one—you’ll notice a tragic message right at the top:

“After 9/15/26, The Columbia House will no longer be accepting new orders. You can still purchase books with your credit card or credits as normal.”

You’re not remembering wrong: It went bankrupt in 2015 . That was a big blow, certainly, but it didn’t drive the company completely out of business until, well, one month from now, when it will start winding down operations by turning away new customers. It survived this long because it stopped selling music, but held onto its basic business concept, transitioning when it needed to, as it always had.

You probably remember it as a CDs-by-mail company, and you may know that it started out as the Columbia Records-associated Columbia Record Club in 1955. But as nostalgia bloggers are fond of pointing out, it didn’t just undergo one big transformation when record collectors switched to CDs. It was nimble from the beginning, spawning the Columbia Reel-to-Reel Club in 1960, the 8-track-centric Columbia Cartridge Club in 1966, and then the Columbia Cassette Club in 1969. In 1985, after the rebrand to Columbia House, it even started selling TV shows on VHS. The format wasn’t the secret sauce, and neither was the content. It was the business model.

I'm pretty sure that I still owe Columbia House money pic.twitter.com/x0uBeD0iu8

Whenever direct mail ads from the Columbia House showed up in my mailbox trumpeting bargains like 8 CDs for a penny, it always seemed like an unbelievable deal to teenage me in the 90s. My parents called it a scam and discouraged me from subscribing, but the price gambit was just a so-so deal, not a scam. The splashy upfront low-price thing was just a transparent method of locking people into contracts that made them buy CDs every month—hopefully for many profitable years. As anyone who has seen Chris Wilcha’s rather astonishing and intimate 1999 documentary the Target Shoots First can tell you, Columbia House may not have been God’s gift to physical media consumers back then, but it was a company like any other, profit-seeking above all else, sure, but staffed by human beings who were trying to perform at least a somewhat valuable service.

You remember Columbia House as “that CDs-by-mail company” because, as Forbes pointed out in 2015, CD sales in general were an absolute feeding frenzy in the mid-90s . Columbia House was positioned to cash in on CD mania, and did, raking in a reported $1.4 billion in revenue in 1996. But as the Hollywood Reporter pointed out in 2015, the CD era was a corporate sugar high, and things soured afterward—long before music streaming came along.