Most of my followers are old enough to remember the old Columbia House and BMG music clubs. They had deals where they would sell you 8 to10 albums for a penny if you would agree to buy a certain number later. They started with albums but over the years, their selections included 8-Track tapes, cassette tapes and CDs. The number of records in the deal also varied over time. Ultimately, you ended up paying about the normal price for each record. The nice thing about the clubs were that you could start getting a lot of music for practically nothing. The drawback was buying the other music to fulfill your obligation to the club, paying more for those albums that you would normally pay at the store. The other hassle was the “selection of the month” that they would automatically send you unless you declined to inform them with a card you returned. Many deadlines were missed, and albums shipped that people didn’t want. The other hassle was trying to return albums you didn’t want.
As a music fan, I was a perfect target for these clubs. I consider my experience with these clubs as generally positive. Especially during the days of the CD clubs, I was able to find new and unique music that I don’t think I would have found any other way.
These clubs marketed themselves through ads in magazines and newspapers. They would also send appeals through the mail to people they had identified as potential customers. I regularly received these types of offers in the mail. Some of these companies had multiple clubs for different music interests. There were times when I was a member of more than one of these clubs at the same time. I was a member of the BMG Classical music club. When I had been a member of the club for a while, they sent me an offer in the mail to join the BMG Christian music club. As I reviewed their selections, I found several CDs by black gospel choirs like the Mississippi Mass Choir. I enjoy their music more that much of the contemporary gospel music at that time, so I focused all my selections on this type of music. After a few months, I received a mailer asking me to join another music club. The material for joining this club included a set of stamps with pictures of the album covers for the available selections. You were supposed to place the stickers for the albums you wanted on the card you returned to them. I think that the possible selections they sent to me were based on the music that I had selected when I had joined the Christian music club. Nearly all the available selections were by black artists. None of the selections were religious. Based on my previous purchases, they either decided that I was black or that I just listened to black music.
