Remember the Columbia House/BMG “10 Cd’s for 99 Cents”?.....

[Won Won]

It was a monthly membership they signed you up for automatically once you took the bait. But all that you had to was cancel it.

Not quite. I think haha.

You had to buy a certain amount of “full price” CDs within a certain timeframe before you could cancel.

Plus they would send you something in the mail about the CD of the month or whatever, and if you didn’t send back the mail in time saying you didn’t want it, they would ship it and charge you.

 

[Luke Cage]

Not quite. I think haha.

You had to buy a certain amount of “full price” CDs within a certain timeframe before you could cancel.

Plus they would send you something in the mail about the CD of the month or whatever, and if you didn’t send back the mail in time saying you didn’t want it, they would ship it and charge you.

you could send it back and they would refund you. made it easy to scam them actually. because if you had preferred member status they would send one paid cd and a free cd everymonth. You coud send back the paid cd and keep the free one. Essentially getting a free cd every month.

 

[Devilinurear]

How did that shyt actually work? I was just a kid at the time and I remember my mom would ask me and my brother what Cd we wanted. I remember looking at the catalog in magazines ... But... I still don’t understand how it exactly worked. Was it legit?

I did it. Only those first 10 were a dollar then you were charged full price for the rest

 

[Won Won]

you could send it back and they would refund you. made it easy to scam them actually. because if you had preferred member status they would send one paid cd and a free cd everymonth. You coud send back the paid cd and keep the free one. Essentially getting a free cd every month.

Didn’t work like that for me in the early-mid 90s. If you didn’t mail back that you didn’t want it within a week or whatever, they were sending and charging for it. I’m actually surprised I don’t have an old catalog kicking around

 

[Blankthawtz]

Lol I started my collection this way

Same....

BMG too....

 

[Luke Cage]

Didn’t work like that for me in the early-mid 90s. If you didn’t mail back that you didn’t want it within a week or whatever, they were sending and charging for it. I’m actually surprised I don’t have an old catalog kicking around

no, you're right about that. i'm just saying that you can get refunded if you mailed back the cd after they sent it to you.

 

[zayk35]

I remember thinking I was so smart and nobody knew how to do this. In high school I had all the tapes a teenager in 90s could want. I spelled everybody in my house names backwards. Always used the same address and kept eating all through high school. My granny never questioned nothing

 

[You Win Perfect]

Not quite. I think haha.

You had to buy a certain amount of “full price” CDs within a certain timeframe before you could cancel.

Plus they would send you something in the mail about the CD of the month or whatever, and if you didn’t send back the mail in time saying you didn’t want it, they would ship it and charge you.

Semantics. it was a “membership” that you automatically got signed up to bruh. You gave them permission to charge you whatever for whatever was a part of that membership

 

[threattonature]

I abused this shyt in college. I would sign up for new accounts with fake names to other rooms in the dorm and then get with the dorm mail team to sit them aside for me. I got hundreds of CDs off of there. I don't think I ever actually fulfilled my obligation even on the ones I used my real name on.

 

[re'up]

I begged my Mom to get me these, because I could never buy as many cd;s as I wanted, like many kids in middle school, I was lucky to get one or three full cd's a year, and a bunch of singles I scrapped change for.

She told me it was a scam, but I just didn't see how. I said the same thing, jut give a fake name lol but I guess it's like a lot of services you get 10 for 99 cents and then you are in a subscription for full price for a year.

 

[Clayton Endicott]

Chronic
Doggystyle
Gangstarr moment of Truth
DMX - Flesh of my Flesh
Big Pun
Maxwell
Jodeci

I have no clue how it worked, but I got my stuff

My first two albums I owned were Apocalypse '91 The Enemy Strikes Back, and Death Certificate. The impression those left on a 12 year old Clayton at the time

 

[Geode]

I forgot all about BMG. I'm sure I had a couple of accounts from there too.

 

[Michael's Black Son]

I forget where I read it, but apparently some of the cds were fake. Fake in the sense that the bar codes didn’t match the ones shipped from the label distributor

yeah they replaced the bar codes with a label that just said it was from Columbia House or BMG Music. Something about it felt less “authentic” even tho the CDs sounded fine. But it just shows how everything (even the retail shyt) was made in the same factories.

 

[Artificial Intelligence]

.......................

 

[Red Money]

In 1994, 15 percent of all discs in the U.S. sold because of these clubs, while a 2011 Boston Phoenix article, “The Rise And Fall Of The Columbia House Record Club—And How We Learned To Steal Music,” reported that 3 million of the 13 million copies sold of Hootie And The Blowfish’s Cracked Rear View were sold this way.

Four Columbia House insiders explain the shady math behind “8 CDs for a penny”

In entertainment, an awful lot of stuff happens behind closed doors, from canceling TV shows to organizing music festival lineups. While the public sees the end product on TVs, movie screens, paper, or radio dials, they don’t see what it took to get there. In Expert Witness, The A.V. Club talks...

www.avclub.com