Columbia House, the iconic mail-order music club, is shutting down after 71 years

After more than seven decades, Columbia House is calling it a day.

The long-running mail-order media club will stop accepting new orders after 15 September, according to a notice on its website. Customers will still be able to purchase books using existing credits or credit cards.

The closure brings an end to a 71-year run for a company that once changed how millions of people discovered and bought music from home.

Founded in 1955 as the Columbia Record Club by CBS/Columbia Records, the service offered records through the mail, allowing listeners to build their collections without heading to a record store. By 1963, it reportedly accounted for 10% of the music retail market.

Columbia House later expanded its catalogue by licensing releases from other labels and evolved alongside the formats music fans were buying, from vinyl records to cassettes and CDs.

For a generation of listeners, the company became synonymous with offers promising a stack of albums for next to nothing — including its memorable deal of as many as 12 CDs for a penny. The catch was that members would subsequently purchase releases at full price, with the service also using a controversial practice known as “negative option billing”, under which customers could be charged for selections unless they opted out.

At its height in 1996, Columbia House counted 16 million members. That same year, it launched its website as music retail began its shift online.

The decades that followed were considerably rockier. Sony sold half of Columbia House to Time Warner in 1991, while subsequent years saw the company change hands multiple times as online retailers, big-box stores and digital music reshaped the way audiences bought and consumed music.

Competitor BMG acquired Columbia House in 2005 and consolidated its operations. Following another acquisition in 2008, the business was renamed Direct Brands, which eventually ended its music mail-order operations while continuing to sell DVDs and Blu-rays under the Columbia House name.

Its Canadian operation ceased business in 2010, while the US company filed for bankruptcy in 2015. Plans were later floated to revive Columbia House as a vinyl subscription service amid the format's resurgence, but the comeback did not materialise.

Sony Music continues to own the Columbia House trademark, while Edge Line Ventures LLC is its current licensee.

For music fans who remember leafing through catalogues and choosing which albums would arrive at their doorstep next, Columbia House's closure marks the end of a distinctly pre-streaming way of discovering and collecting music.