Columbia House, now there’s a blast from the past. It’s hard for the younger generations to remember a time before you could grab the latest tune from iTunes or listen to your favorite music on Spotify. Back in the day we actually had to drive to a record store and purchase an album, cassette tape, or later on music on CD. There was an alternative to driving to the nearest record store. You could sign up for Columbia House and receive tapes or CDs by mail. Unfortunately Columbia House never moved into streaming music and is now filing for bankruptcy.
The days of getting “Any 11 tapes or records for only 1 cent” is over. In case you weren’t around when Columbia House was popular, the music-by-mail service would give new members there first albums nearly free with a commitment to purchase a minimum number of albums in the future. The business model was quite effective and helped Columbia House earn $1.4 billion at the peak of the service in 1996. That compares to just $17 million last year. Columbia House has been out of the music business since 2010 so the bankruptcy isn’t too much of a surprise.
Glenn Landberg, the director of Columbia House wrote this statement in the bankruptcy filing, “This decline is directly attributable to a confluence of market factors that substantially altered the manner in which consumers purchase and listen to music, as well as the way consumers purchase and watch movies and television series at home,” which pretty much sums up the reason for the company’s demise. Times have changed as technology have brought music directly to the masses. We can now use streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music to listen to millions of songs instantly. There is no need to order music by mail anymore. The same is true for movies and TV series.
I still have a collection of albums, tapes, and CDs so I can understand the benefits of having physical media. However, the advantages of streaming music far outweigh popping a CD into my stereo. I don’t see that trend changing as we move faster and faster into the Internet of Things (IoT) era. Soon we will be able to listen to music from a wide range of streaming services on an even wider range of devices. This will bring music to users regardless of where you are or what you’re doing at the time. The days of filling out an order form and waiting for albums to come in the mail are well past. In this case the progress of technical innovation is having a significant impact on music fans.
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