Almost every physical CD I own to this day came from Columbia House and their random ass "get 12 CDs for five cents" ads.
The rest were either given to me by friends, found on the street, one is stolen (literally stole Steal This Album by SOAD from a Target when I was a madlad teenager), and the rest are burned from MP3s downloaded off the internet.
I hit both of them pretty hard. I just kept filling out those cards for the deals and not buying anything at full price and they never stopped sending me the CDs, I paid something like $20 for 150 albums. A bunch of kids at my school did that and we would just make copies of everything and trade them to each other. I got a call from collections one time and told them good luck getting any money because I was 16 years old and they never called again haha.
I did. I loved music and it was cheaper than the record store. It only seems dumb now because of the internet. The big downside of it was limited choices, but it also got me to try some new music out. It was one of those things every comedian made fun of, yet participated in.
Yeah, this is a thread for old farts. I'll confess that I signed up for Columbia House back before CDs. Got 10 records for a penny and had to commit to buy 5 more over the next year. Each month, there was a "selection of the month" announced and if your didn't respond within the required amount of time, it would show up at your door and you were stuck with the bill and the record. This is why many of the records you find on the used market are "club editions" that lack many of the more expensive features like gatefold covers.
I did. My mom thought it was an excellent deal and we maintained our subscription for many years, actually. They’d give you deals on cds periodically, so yeah my parents were all about it. They also did the movie one.
We didn’t have many CDs even after CD players had become pretty popular so we had Columbia House. We would typically the the 3 CDs that you bought for a special price from a catalog and nothing more. It was helpful in getting a decent collection pretty quickly though. Almost all of my CDs as a kid came from them.