Anyone else ever joined the old record and tape clubs?

[Ivan May]

Yes, before Apple Music and Spotify entered the picture, there was something called the record and tape clubs. These record clubs were known as the RCA Music Service and the Columbia House Music club (the RCA Music Service later changed its name to the BMG Direct Marketing Club when BMG bought out RCA in 1987). It operated somewhat like a mail order service: you could look in a magazine at their advertising, pick out 12 tapes for just one cent, and then the records would come to your house. As CD sales dwindled in the mid 2000s, the company wound up out of fashion, but Vinyl Me, Please has a similar offer: pick out your favorite vinyl records and genres, and they’ll deliver it to your house. I have several CDs that are from either Columbia House or BMG Direct Marketing, and if I remember correctly, they were headquartered at the Columbia Records pressing plant in Terre Haute, Indiana. My dad and a few other of my family members were members of those record clubs. I actually have a cassette of Permanent Vacation by Aerosmith that is from Columbia House. I acquired it from my grandmother several years ago when I was helping her clean out her house and downsize before she moved. I also have a CD of Permanent Vacation that is from Columbia House.

 

 

I hope this thread brings back some much needed memories.

[Notes_Norton]

I did records, Columbia House and perhaps another. It was a long time ago.

 

I never liked cassette tapes. Low-fidelity compared to vinyl.

 

I had a recorder at home, so I would record tapes to play in the car. That way when the cassette deck in the car got hungry and decided to eat the tape I wasn't out anything but a blank tape. I had the music at home to record another.

 

For my car now, I have a digital Walkman with over 10,000 songs on it culled from my LP/CD/Legal-Download collection. Mostly 128 or 192k mp3s, which IMO sound better than cassettes ever did. But with the road noise, supreme fidelity is lost anyway.

 

Notes ♫

[Jeff Leites]

My parents joined one when we got our first console "Hi-Fi", I think around 1961.  Two of the records they let me get were the Bobby Rydell/Chubby Checker, and the Elvis Presley Blue Hawaii LPs 😁

        

[Dave Bryce]

I did.  Such a long time ago…

 

dB

[Shamanzarek]

I joined them all in the 60s, Columbia, RCA, and Capitol. I also got LPs from Records Unlimited which was a division of Columbia but wasn't really a club but more of a discount selling service. You had to be a member of all these because you could only get Columbia and Epic from Columbia, and you could only get RCA and Capitol from their respective clubs. They all carried a wide variety of other labels. Anything I couldn't get from a club I would buy at a store when they were on sale. Within a couple of years I had a about two hundred albums. I still have all those albums and it has grown to over 700 in the intervening years. I joined a couple of CD clubs in the 90s but now I don't buy records or CDs any more with all the content available on YouTube. For listening I use Pandora on the TV. I can get it to play deep cuts I really like which I never hear on Sirius.

[Anderton]

NARAS used to sell records and then CDs for cheap via what was called the "Grammy Awards Guide." IT WAS AWESOME!! LPs for a couple dollars, CDs for $8 IIRC when they were going for $20 in the real world. It went away when the world went digital.

[David Emm]

By the time those first services appeared, I was already aware of the snare involved, so I never went there. I'd already begun to learn about higher-end music one rarely encountered in those catalogs. I was a library listener and then a record bin diver. Once I latched onto what used record stores offered, I became a serious independent explorer. I learned early on to make cassettes and preserve the LPs. I also discovered fringe gems on cassette in cut-out bins, such as the excellent Eno/John Cale album "Wrong Way Up." I was into the Beatles, but also Michel Legrand's "Summer of '42"/"The Picasso Summer" soundtrack. I started running the gamut early.                                                                              

[The Real MC]

Aw sh!t - I knew I forgot to cancel something...

[bill5]

Yeah I joined them several times and loved it, it was a great deal...something like 12 albums for a penny and all you had to do was buy 3 more albums in the next three years (and the prices weren't that bad)? Sold! It was like Christmas in August (or whatever)

[Threadslayer]

What I remember was how many kids, including one cousin of mine, got way over their heads financially by the deceptive and predatory business practices of those clubs. Once you received the bait set of basically free albums they helpfully set you up to receive 2 or more selections (made especially for you!) per month whether you wanted them or not, and it was hell to get out of the contract.

[Lou Gehrig Charles]

I never got involved in these programs, but used to pore over the ads and look at the albums.  Remember the ones that had the little "postage stamp" sized stickers you could fasten to the order form?  I turned them into posters for the buildings on my HO scale train layout.

 

 

[Notes_Norton]

Since I never used a credit cart, but instead, a check, it was easy to cancel after the promotion was over.

[bill5]

9 hours ago, Threadslayer said:

What I remember was how many kids, including one cousin of mine, got way over their heads financially by the deceptive and predatory business practices of those clubs. Once you received the bait set of basically free albums they helpfully set you up to receive 2 or more selections (made especially for you!) per month whether you wanted them or not, and it was hell to get out of the contract.

? That wasn't true for Colombia or RCA. There was nothing deceptive or predatory about it. They had recommended purchases, but they weren't automatically sent to you, and they certainly didn't "force" them on you. 

[AnotherScott]

10 hours ago, Threadslayer said:

Once you received the bait set of basically free albums they helpfully set you up to receive 2 or more selections (made especially for you!) per month whether you wanted them or not, and it was hell to get out of the contract.

Once you fulfilled the obligation (i.e. you had to buy 8 albums or whatever, having received your first bunch practically free), cancelling was easy. But no, you couldn't simply cancel if you hadn't made the purchases you had agreed to make.

 

40 minutes ago, bill5 said:

? That wasn't true for Colombia or RCA. There was nothing deceptive or predatory about it. They had recommended purchases, but they weren't automatically sent to you, and they certainly didn't "force" them on you. 

They were automatically sent every month unless you sent back the card for that month choosing to opt-out of that month's selection.

 

 

[bill5]

ah OK. That sounds vaguely familiar (it's been a long time!). Still, not deceptive or predatory. My only problem was after doing the deal a time or two, the albums I was interested in got rather limited, so I stopped. In fact, it might have also been the hassle of doing the monthly "no thanks" that got tiresome.

[Threadslayer]

Here's what Wikipedia has to say: 

"

Business practices[edit]

Since Columbia House's beginnings, following the sale of Columbia House to BMG, and continuing after the sale to Direct Brands, Columbia House has attracted criticism for its business practices, some of which are outlined here:

Membership[edit]

During the first three decades of Columbia House, it had a most unique marketing strategy: Give the customer a handful of vinyl records for free (although most of its early marketing campaigns required the customer to tape a penny to the enclosed postcard/order form) with the promise that they would purchase a set number of records at full retail price plus shipping.

There were dozens of small sheets of stamps that were enclosed in the mailer. These stamps had pictures of the actual album cover of the records that Columbia House would sell. The customer would tear the stamp off the sheet, lick the back of the stamp and affix them onto the order card.

These Columbia House envelopes would come as junk mail to what seemed was everyone's home on a regular basis. One recipient might get one type of offer, but a neighbor might receive a more lucrative offer. Many times, it was the teenagers of the house who intercepted this mail. They were easily suckered in with the idea of getting the albums they wanted all at once and all they had to do was to buy three or four albums within the next two or three years. There were many underage customers who legally could not be bound to this agreement/contract; Columbia House knew these were unenforceable, but they didn’t care (though eventually, this policy did change).[citation needed] Columbia House made it easy to defraud them. .. "

 

Columbia (Columbia House) was an umbrella marketing agency under Columbia Records which farmed out sub-contracts to various regional marketers - some more ethical than others apparently. The Wiki description above mirrors my recollection. This was in rural Vermont in the early '60s.

[eric]

I remember joining one of these when I was in my early teens and it was really exciting to pick those initial albums for a penny. My parents were unhappy with me for doing this (I guess I intercepted it in the mail, LOL), and then we did have a period where it felt like if you weren't totally on top of things, new items would arrive unexpectedly. I believe the one that I joined had a requirement to buy 2-3 regularly priced albums within a year or something. I somehow got a little behind on tracking the mail back indicating "don't want this" and so things would arrive that I hadn't picked. Chalk all of this up to being a youngster, and this was how these companies would hope to make money. Not sure if it's completely predatory or deceptive, given that I was definitely a minor at the time and likely outside of the purview of their contracts. My parents started watching the mail a lot more closely after this and I was forbidden from signing up for anything else. Good times.

[ElmerJFudd]

They still had these clubs going on in the CD age.  I joined just as ripping CDs to iPod was taking off - which was my plan.  Got the stack of hits and dessert island albums I wanted, had to suffer the cancellation process but it worked out alright. 

[bill5]

On 11/14/2023 at 9:10 AM, eric said:

Not sure if it's completely predatory or deceptive

I'm sure; it's not. They were clear and up front about the requirements. If kids forgot to send in the monthly "I don't want anything," that's not on them. If parents weren't on top of what their kids were doing, that's on them. If we're going to start slamming companies for taking advantage of people (esp kids) not having both eyes wide open or being irresponsible/naive/etc, it's going to be a long list.. 

[Notes_Norton]

Back then there were other similar businesses like “The Book Of The Month Club”.

 

I suppose it's not very different from Amazon offering you Prime free for a month, allowing you to cancel, but hoping you will forget to do so.

 

Notes ♫

[Lou Gehrig Charles]

8 minutes ago, Notes_Norton said:

Back then there were other similar businesses like “The Book Of The Month Club”.

 

 

I remember it also was back in the days of "allow four to six weeks for delivery".  Imagine if that was the norm nowadays!  Now, when I order something I get annoyed if I don't get a tracking number later the same day.  How things have changed!

[BluMunk]

Mid-90s in high school, I went in on a membership with a friend. After our initial "12 for $12", I have no idea if he kept the membership or what. I don't remember all the discs I got, but I know it included: Rush Chronicles (we had one Rush album at home, Presto, which I liked, and wanted to hear more), The Three Tenors in Concert 1994, and Yanni Live at the Acropolis. I was a very hip and with it kid, as you can tell.

[Notes_Norton]

5 hours ago, Lou Gehrig Charles said:

I remember it also was back in the days of "allow four to six weeks for delivery". 

Yes, I remember that. We are much more impatient and spoiled now.

 

When I first started selling aftermarket style and fake disks for Band-in-a-Box, in the 1990s, I sent out catalogs in the mail. A customer then sent me a check or credit card number in the mail. I'd fill the order the next day, take it to the post office, and send it back. It was over a week round trip, first class mail.

 

As the Internet arrived, and grew, I embraced it. Now when someone places an order, it goes through my shopping cart, an authorization company verifies the credit card or PayPal does the same. As soon as it's verified, usually a few seconds, the shopping cart automatically and immediately sends download information.

 

It's a lot easier for me, and a lot quicker for my customers. Of course, it costs me money for the web host, authorization services, and the shopping cart. PayPal or the credit card merchant's account take a percentage, but that's the price of progress.

 

Notes ♫

[RABid]

Over and over and over. Once I got serious about mailing back those cards, buying the required amount of albums to satisfy the contract, then sending a cancelation letter things opened up for this country boy with no local record stores. I could get in and out in 3 months, then watch those "Please come back" offers arrive in the mail. When I liked the offer and the available records I would join again. I remember the first time I joined. Ran out of selections I wanted so I picked two albums solely on the album cover. Boy did I luck out. My choices were the first Santana album (lion head) and Led Zeppelin III (that colorful wheel).

[Shamanzarek]

I remember if you continued your membership after fulfilling the initial obligation you would get a free record album for every two you purchased at regular club price which never exceeded retail price. You could also get something like three free records for getting a friend to join the club. If a friend signed up through me he could choose from a much greater selection of records from the club magazine rather than the limited selection listed in the ads. I did find if you had the catalog numbers from the club magazine you could order almost anything that was available using the application in the ads.

[RABid]

10 hours ago, Shamanzarek said:

I did find if you had the catalog numbers from the club magazine you could order almost anything that was available using the application in the ads.

Yes. I used to keep a catalog just for that. At the time I did not know the record companies and record clubs were cutting artists out of the loop and not paying them anything for club sales. They used a "used for advertising" clause. That is why some artists with the power to enforce their will were not available in clubs.