Earlier this week I saw a headline saying that Columbia House is shutting down.

My first thought was: sweet jittery Moses, Columbia House still exists?!?!

My second thought was: wow, did I ever get a lot of music from Columbia House. I know they made their money on people forgetting to send back the negative-option card that said, “Please DON’T send me that Michael McDonald album.” but I was on top of it. I did the math…I got the intro offer and bought my minimum commitment and cancelled my subscription and waited for their even better “We want you back!” offer, and then repeated the process over and over. I remember at one point cancelling my subscription in a letter and specifically saying, “Just go ahead and send me the offer you send people when they cancel ASAP.” and they did.

Somewhere in my basement are 487 physical CDs. I stopped buying physical media in April 2006, but I always kept them around in case some day I decide to re-rip them at a lossless bitrate. (When I originally ripped them to MP3 storage on both my desktop and my Creative Labs mp3 player was at a premium, so the songs were all at 128kbps.) I would have sold or traded away a lot of the CDs I bought as a teenager, but still…I bet more than a few of the discs down there came from a Columbia House 1¢ sale.

[UPDATE: maybe it’s not disappearing?]