Posted on 08/11/2015 5:24:12 AM PDT by rickmichaels
NEW YORK -- The company that once offered to sell you eight CDs for 1 cent has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after almost 20 years of falling sales.
The parent of the Columbia House music and DVD clubs said Monday it plans to sell its Columbia House DVD Club business, which sells recorded movies and TV series directly to consumers, through a bankruptcy auction.
The reasons for the bankruptcy read like a history of the changes that have swept through the entertainment industry and retail over the last two decades.
In the late 1990s, the mail-order Columbia House Music Club was damaged by Napster, the first major site that allowed people to share their music for free, followed by Napster's rivals and successors. Then came Apple's iPod and iTunes music store, which let consumers buy music and download it almost instantly while making it more portable than ever.
Around the same time, online marketplaces like Amazon.com and eBay were taking off and Netflix offered unlimited DVD rentals through the mail. Big retailers like Wal-Mart, Target and Costco were also expanding rapidly. Universal Music, the largest recorded music company, also decided not to renew a license agreement with Columbia House.
Within a few years, Apple and Amazon and Netflix would unveil streaming options that did away with physical media entirely. Citing market research, Columbia House's parent says the DVD market has shrunk by about half since 2006.
The New York-based parent company, Filmed Entertainment, says its revenue rose to $1.4 billion in 1996 and fell almost every year after that. In 2014, its revenue totalled about $17 million, barely 1% of its peak figure.
(Excerpt) Read more at torontosun.com ...
I remember getting 11 free 7” open rel tapes from them. All except Bachman-Turner-Overddrive “Not Fragile” were recorded at 3 3/4 ips. RIP-OFF!
The hardest part of the freebie lot was after picking the 2 or 3 choices you wanted having to sort trough the 99 other choices of crap bands to make up the remainder.
I was a member of the Capitol Record Club in the 1960’s.I was very green back then.
My first album was Joe Walsh - So What
I was only 10,,, what were my parents thinking?
I don’t know how many people must have done that when we were in high school. Get 11 free and promise to buy a bunch more. Hell we were minors...sue me.
Granted the free selection sucked but you still something for nothing.
I still have my TEAK reel to reel.
No 4 track tapes are available anymore.
We haven’t bought a CD in ages.
Tunes arrive via Dish or Siris...
I agree, my MP3 downloads must be new and in their protective wrapping. :o)
Yup. The only decent album I got through Columbia House was Def Leppard’s Pyromania.
I think I bought some CDs from them years ago, that I’ve never even taken the shrinkwrap off of.
Ripping people off since 1955.
What goes around comes around.
As a naive 12 year old, I signed up for this club. Got a bunch of Aerosmith and Kiss tapes on cassette. But then my mother started tossing the monthly mailers, thinking it was junk mail. As a result, I started getting shipped to me all these lame cassettes that they were trying to charge me $15.98 for (plus shipping and handling). They would send me cassettes by Ambrosia and Captain and Tennille, I'm talking really lame stuff.
I think you had 7 days to send it back without getting charged so I'd have to dash to the post office and pay for postage to send it all back. It took me years to get out of that club. It was worse then trying to cancel America Online back in the 1990s.
The only worthy CD I got from them was Tesla’s Five Man Acoustical Jam.
Negative-option billing. It was a scam then and it’s a scam now.
The only two worthwhile albums in my selection were Bob Segar Live and ZZ Top Tejas.
There are some funny comments here. I remember the awful selections they had for albums.
Who knew they were still in business?
There hasn’t been good music in the past 30+ years.
I think they came up with that ‘Club’ as a gimmick to get rid of their otherwise-unsalable albums. BTDT. Heh...
My mother in law was the last person I knew that still used cassettes; she had boxes of her favorite tapes. Her last car HAD to have a tape player! I believe the Buick dealer slipped the car to the wrong side of the tracks for the installation.
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