Columbia House Files for Bankruptcy
 

Read more: Columbia House Files for Bankruptcy, Blames Streaming | Rolling Stone

They offered a cool service which I used a handful of times back in the day, but the natural evolution of how music is accessed made their downfall inevitable. According to the article, they got out of the music business in 2010 and went to DVDs, but even struggled there.

They can go ahead and blame streaming, but their real problem is not being able to adapt.

I did one of the 8 cds thing as a kid and used my dad's credit card without his permission (just a penny, he wouldn't even notice). A few payments that should have gotten me hundreds of cds showed up on his card at once and we had to skip dinner for three nights that week. Good riddance.

That's what they get for charging me for that Eric Clapton live album that I didn't want and never received back in 1995.

I did it with the permission of my parents, but I don't think they understood how it all worked. Quite frankly, neither did my young self. I ordered a bunch of CDs, which included Metallica's Ride The Lightning and Snoop Dog's Doggystyle, among others. One of the actual gems I got in a bundle order from Columbia House was Alice in Chains' Jar of Flies, which got me more into this band than what I had heard on the radio. With Snoop Dog, I probably bought the Doggystyle album because (a) it was in a prominent place in the brochure, and (b) because I liked the album cover. I didn't know what it was, really. Well, my mother heard it playing and proceeded to lay the biggest guilt trip on me of all time. So much so that later on I destroyed the album with a sledgehammer.

I think like anything else, if you had read the fine print and understood how it worked, it would've been a beneficial system for discovering new music you otherwise wouldn't have bought outright at your local record store.

Just a sad story about a great label going down hill.