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The more famous and oldest club is the BMG Music Service. This club allows members to receive 11 free CDs as long as they purchase one at regular price within a year of sign-up. Members must, however, pay shipping costs for each of the CDs they order (including the free ones), which is about two bucks apiece. A newer music club at the BMG store ...
- Columbia House
Columbia House merged with Sony/BMG in 2005. Columbia House...
- BMG Music Service
BMG Music Pricing Review. As far as BMG is concerned, here's...
- Columbia House
Jun 14, 2019 · At their mid-1990s peak, Columbia House and BMG made a lot of money. According to The Recording Industry by Geoffrey P. Hull, music clubs paid between $1.50 and $5.50 for a CD, which they then sold for $16. He reports that if the clubs sold one out of every three discs, they'd make close to $8 in profit.
- Nothing in Life Is Free. Especially CDs
- Inside The Belly of The Beast
- When The Music’s Over
- Turn Out The Lights
CD clubs offered ever-shifting traps for all ages and tastes, the deadliest of which involved ordering and receiving free albums, not paying a thing, never canceling the subscription, then dropping off company radar. Once a given time passes, contract clauses spring to life, full price is charged for all free discs, a collection agency is assigned,...
To keep costs low and profit margins high, CD clubs produced their own discs to sell, some apparently of questionable sound quality. Stereophileconducted a test in 1994in which top audio engineers repeatedly listened to both club and retail releases of the same albums, and indeed, they detected inconsistencies — different compression levels, stereo...
By 2003, the unraveling had begun. In a class-action lawsuit, a U.S. District Judge dropped the hammer on CD club private defendants, for what CBS News called a “price-fixing conspiracy.” A $143 million settlement was dispensed to millions of buyers, in the form of 75% discounts on full-priced club discs…which required a membership to buy. The priv...
BMG CD club was ultimately put to sleep in 2009 by its parent Columbia House group, who then succumbed to bankruptcy in 2015. In addition to schemesters and lawsuits, several clear factors led to their downfall. One painful legal caveat involved clubs having to wait from three months to a year before being permitted to sell an artist’s new release....
Jan 2, 2019 · Columbia House and BMG Music used to sell 12 CDs for a dollar or even a penny, and somehow brought in $1.5 billion in revenue at their peak.
Aug 11, 2015 · Columbia House once set the bar for the music-club subscription business model, becoming a household — or at least high school — name through its famous deal: piles of CDs and tapes for a penny.
Jan 2, 2019 · Matthew Stuart. Updated 2 January 2019. How Columbia House sold 12 CDs for as little as a penny. In the mid-90s, Columbia House and the BMG Music Service offered unbelievable deals on CDs. People joined these clubs for a penny and got a bunch of music almost for free as long as they promised to buy a certain amount of music at regular club prices.
