News Summary

• Columbia House, the mail-order music club that once boasted it would send you 12 albums for a penny, is alive in 2026 but not well.
• The company’s website announced it is shutting down September 15th.
• Columbia House started out in 1955 as Columbia Record Club, an experiment by Columbia Records to capture a share of the record-buying public by getting them to pay a membership fee.
• The experiment worked, and by 1996, Columbia House had 16 million members.