I don’t think that I ever got music that way but I joined the American Artist book club two or three times over the years in the pre-WWW days and made it work in my favor with the initial free or deeply-discounted books and occasional specials.
The SF Book Club sent stuff I actually wanted to read. With Columbia House it was a challenge even finding twelve (I remember it as eight for 1¢, optionally another four for the price of one) CDs I wanted to begin with.
I got kicked out of the Science Fiction book club for just the same reasons.
Me too. My sister and I got in on it together. I think I remember most of the cassettes we ordered on the first card:
ZZ Top - Eliminator (mine)
Van Halen - 1984 (mine)
Dokken - Tooth and Nail (hers)
Billy Squier - Signs of Life (hers)
Deep Purple - Perfect Strangers (hers)
Scorpions - Love at First Sting (hers)
Billy Idol - Rebel Yell (hers)
The Cars - Heartbeat City (mine)
Dire Straits - Brothers in Arms (mine)
Motley Crue - Shout at the Devil (hers)
The Police - Synchronicity (mine)
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers - Southern Accents (mine)
Kinda weird that within a couple of years, all those tapes except for Billy Idol ended up getting played more by me than by my sister. She started embracing more of a Cure/Oingo Boingo/Depeche Mode playlist. And I still listen to all those records. As I’ve mentioned hereabouts before, I’ve owned something like seven or eight copies of that Deep Purple record. The Columbia Record & Tape Club copy was only the first (it melted on the dashboard of our shared Mercury station wagon circa 1986).
I remember this particular music payload because it was such a novelty to us. We never had much money and rarely got to buy music, so a windfall of twelve albums’ worth of music was unforgettable to us.
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It wasn’t really a scam. As I understood it at the time, Columbia House couldn’t mail me something without me explicitly asking for it and not pay for return shipping if I refused the package. It’s not like I kept the CDs. If I was wrong about their obligations, they never did anything about it. They never even sent threatening letters; they just stopped sending anything at all.
“For which you should be very grateful” – said the Old who was a four-year member of Columbia House Record Club ; -)
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Ha! Grateful for cassettes… listen here, Elder, don’t make me make you actually listen to one of those squeaky, wow-and-fluttery, hissy, jammy, low-signal-to-noise shitbox tapes… you should be grateful that you bought a medium that, if you took reasonably good care of it, is still playable (and widely preferred!) even today.
Man, I hate cassette tapes. I owned dozens (hundreds?) of 'em, and I’m not nostalgic for 'em at all.
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[quote=“Donald_Petersen, post:27, topic:59427”]
I’m not nostalgic for 'em at all[/quote]
In retrospect they were awful. I have maybe a half-a-dozen tapes of speeches and audio books I need to digitize, then I hope to never have to handle one again.
But back in the day, it was WAY cool having an inexpensive recording format, and a compact medium for playing music in cars and such.
BMG, Columbia House, CDHQ (my favorite), CDx, YourMusic… I was a member of 'em all! I’m positive I racked up HUNDREDS of CDs throughout the '90s/00s, thanks to these clubs. Sure, the $17+ full-priced albums to fulfill club commitment were a bitch, but what made up for it were the deals. Like the regular buy 1, get 3 free offers. Or the bargain bin catalogs where everything was priced dirt cheap. And the deep discount BOX SETS!! Even after figuring in shipping + handling, the price per CD was still a fraction of what you’d pay full retail. For a music junkie like me who grew up in a rural area lacking record shops, these clubs were a godsend. And I gamed the system every which way I could. 
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Yeah, the mixtape easily made up for any possible audio quality difference, and size and shape were a big bonus too. Listening to what you want, when you want, is probably the most important virtue of a music storage format.
But they were often a nuisance. I remember that The Wall, in particular, was just a bit too long for the format: too much tape which most cassette players had trouble pulling through consistently. I probably wound up buying three copies, and all were stretched or eaten eventually.
SF Book Club, as previously mentioned, was like this and I got exposed to a lot of great works from it, and I don’t believe I ever forgot and mailed something I didn’t want. I got a lot of great books for a penny, and a lot of great books for a reasonable price.
I still have a lot of those great books.
Don’t get me wrong – I love me some vinyl LPs. (Ha, some of those old Columbia House LPs are still spinnin’ here.) But it’s membership in the cassette generation I covet, not the medium itself…too often these days I’m the oldest person in the room, and that’s still a bit of a shock. (Party talk used to start with something like, “What’s your sign?” Now it’s more like, “So, what’s your expiration date?” ; -)
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What is that, Henny Youngman? Are you sure you’re not from the 78rpm generation, rather than the cassette one?
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