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The penny. That’s what caught my attention first. Then I went straight to the long list of artists and albums and started picking out the CDs I’d order if I joined.
I remember those Columbia House and BMG offers showing up as standalone mailers, though I remember seeing ads in magazines, too. I can still picture the perforated card you were supposed to tear out and mail back.
I used to pick things out of all kinds of catalogs. When I was a preteen waiting to get my ears pierced, I did it with earring catalogs, too. Sometimes there was a payoff: my grandmother would take our store catalog picks as a Christmas list and choose from them. The CD mailers were strictly a “what if I joined?” exercise, though. My parents were into music, but there was no way I was actually mailing that card.
Back then, it never occurred to me to wonder what the clubs got out of it. Now I look at those offers and think, “But surely there’s a catch somewhere….”
There was fine print, plenty of it. But the basic answer is that Columbia House and BMG could afford to send out cheap CDs because they made their own copies at a lower cost, charged regular club prices for paid orders, and collected shipping and handling. And if you let the deadline on a reply card pass, a club could send you a CD and bill you for it. What surprised me was that the deal could still work out pretty well for the person buying the music.
How the Columbia House and BMG CD Offers Worked
In the April 1994 issue of Stereo Review, both clubs ran ads that promised eight CDs. The numbers looked close enough until you got to what you had to buy after mailing the card.
| Columbia House Jazz Club | BMG Music Service | |
|---|---|---|
| What you got first | Eight CDs for a penny, plus shipping and handling | Four free CDs, with shipping and handling charged for each |
| What you agreed to buy | Six more CDs in three years at $12.98 to $16.98 each, plus shipping and handling | One CD within a year, starting at $14.98, plus shipping and handling |
| What happened after that | You could cancel once you’d bought the six CDs | Buying that one CD unlocked three more, with shipping and handling still due on each |
The Columbia House ad was for jazz, but a June 1993 ad in Circus offered the same eight-CD deal across a broader catalog. It even told you what to put in the envelope: $1.86, which covered the penny and $1.85 in shipping and handling. That same ad offered 12 cassettes for a penny. By 1999, the Los Angeles Times was reporting a Columbia House pitch for 12 CDs for a penny and a BMG offer for 12 CDs for the price of one. The number depended on which ad you saw.
The card you mailed to join was only the beginning. Once you were a member, the club sent catalogs with a featured selection and a card you could send back to choose something else or decline. If you did nothing, the club could send the featured CD and bill you. It was called “negative option,” which sounds like a much more formal way of saying that the club took silence as a yes. BMG’s 1994 ad said members could get a new catalog about every three weeks. That’s a lot of mail to keep up with!
Did you know? BMG’s April 1994 ad said members had at least 10 days to return the reply card. If the club gave you less time and sent an unwanted featured CD, the ad said you could return it at BMG’s expense.
How the Clubs Made Money
The penny got you in the door, but regular-price orders were where the clubs made their money. Columbia House’s six required purchases gave it six chances to collect the full club price, plus shipping and handling. BMG asked for one paid purchase in its 1994 offer and gave members reasons to keep shopping after that, including discounts on additional CDs. Featured selections gave both clubs a way to keep selling between the orders members actively placed.
The other half of the answer was what the CDs cost the clubs in the first place. A record store bought finished discs at wholesale. The clubs could license the recordings and album artwork and make their own copies for much less.
Piotr Orlov, who worked in artist relations and marketing at Columbia House in the late ’90s, told NPR that the company made deals with major music companies for the materials it needed to manufacture its CDs. Billboard also reported that clubs typically paid reduced royalties on sales and that some promotional copies generated no payments for labels or recording artists, even though songwriters and composers could still be owed royalties. The exact terms depended on the contracts.
Were CD Clubs Actually a Good Deal?
Here’s where the math surprised me. In 1993, The Washington Post compared what it would cost to take the introductory offer and meet the purchase requirements at each club. The paper put store prices at around $10 to $15 a CD at the time.
| 1993 example | CDs after meeting the commitment | Approximate total with shipping and handling | Average cost per CD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Columbia House | 14 | $103 | $7.35 |
| BMG Music Service | 8 | $31 | Just under $4 |
If you wanted all eight, BMG’s deal came out to less than $4 a CD — way cheaper than buying an individual CD at the store. Even the Columbia House example came in below the paper’s store prices. The catch was that the savings depended on what you wanted and how you shopped. A catalog might have plenty to choose from and still be missing the one album you wanted. An extra full-price CD you hadn’t planned to buy could also make that average look less appealing, especially if you’d simply forgotten to mail a card.
I can’t remember which albums I picked from those mailers. I listened to a lot of pop in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and by around 1993 I was listening to grunge, alternative rock, and some ’60s and ’70s folk and rock. The music I actually brought home came from record stores like Tower Records. There were also mix tapes and, later, CDs we copied for each other. The mailers were one more place to look through music, even if my orders never made it past my head.
What Happened to Columbia House and BMG?
By the late ’90s, fewer people needed to replace whole collections of records and tapes with CDs. Big-box stores and online sellers gave shoppers more options. The clubs tried to adapt. In 1999, Billboard reported that Columbia House’s new Play club let members choose when to order, without automatic shipments. BMG was trying to sell more to existing members through promotions and clubs built around specific genres.
BMG Direct bought Columbia House in 2005, and BMG Music Service announced it would close in June 2009. Columbia House was out of the music business by 2010. Its parent company filed for bankruptcy in 2015, by which point the remaining Columbia House business was a DVD club.
Those mailers have me thinking about Blockbuster and Netflix in the 2000s. Getting music in the mail was part of the appeal of a CD club. Netflix later made getting movies in the mail the appeal, too, and I understand why. Some nights, the last thing I want is another reason to leave the house.
That said, I do miss taking my time in the video store aisles. I miss it for the same reason I miss roaming the mall with nothing in particular to buy. Choosing a movie could be an event in itself, something to look forward to before you’d even settled on what you were going to watch. I think that’s some of what I enjoyed about those CD mailers, too. I could spend time with the list just imagining what I’d get.
Of course, if the video store came back, I’d need to buy a DVD player again.
