What stops on September 15, 2026
Columbia House is closing after 71 years. A notice on its website told customers that "After 9/15/26, The Columbia House will no longer be accepting new orders," and a customer service representative confirmed the shutdown to CNN by phone in August 2026.
There was no press release, no farewell campaign and no final catalog. For a company that mailed tens of millions of Americans a reply card every month, the ending arrived as one line of text on a web page most people assumed had stopped loading years ago.
What closes is not the music club. Columbia House dropped CDs in 2010 and spent the next sixteen years selling DVDs and Blu-rays to a shrinking list of members. The business shutting down in September 2026 is a mail-order movie club that outlived the format war, the DVD player in most American living rooms and Blockbuster itself.
Existing memberships and outstanding purchases are being honored while the company winds down, so members with discs on order are not cut off on the fifteenth. After that date, the sign-up form is the part that goes away first.
How a penny bought 12 CDs and still made money
The offer was real. New members picked eight, ten or twelve titles for one cent, sent no money up front, and agreed to buy a set number of albums later at what the fine print called regular club prices, plus shipping and handling.
The giveaway was the cheap part. Mental Floss reported that a free disc cost Columbia House roughly $1.50 to produce, and that the clubs paid music publishers 75 percent of the standard statutory royalty rather than the full rate, a discount written into the way record clubs licensed songs.
The money came afterward. Every month the club shipped a Selection of the Month unless the member mailed back a card refusing it before a deadline, a practice regulators call negative option billing. Miss the deadline, and the album arrived anyway at full club price, with shipping charged per disc.
On that arithmetic, Mental Floss estimated Columbia House made as much as $7.50 on each album it shipped. The penny was marketing. The postage, the deadlines and the albums nobody meant to order were the business, which is why a generation remembers the club as both a gift and a trap.
Why 16 million members disappeared
Columbia House began in 1955 as the Columbia Record Club, an experiment by Columbia Records in selling music by mail to Americans who lived nowhere near a record store. It took the Columbia House name in the early 1970s and turned into a fixture of late night television.
Rolling Stone described those commercials in 2026 as coming on "like the cheesiest sitcom jingle ever," built on the claim that the club was "Big enough to entertain America ... one person at a time!"
The CD boom made it enormous. By 1996 Columbia House had about 16 million members and roughly $1.4 billion in annual revenue, the high water mark every later figure gets measured against.
Then the reasons to join evaporated one by one. Big box chains undercut club prices, Napster made the catalog free in 1999, and paid downloads made a monthly reply card look absurd. The Sony Discman gave way to the iPod, the shelf of club CDs stopped growing, and Columbia House stopped selling music altogether in 2010.
Who owns Columbia House now?
Filmed Entertainment Inc., the company behind the club, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Manhattan in August 2015. The filing put revenue at about $17 million in 2014, down from $1.4 billion in 1996, against $2 million in assets and $62 million in liabilities.
The court papers also showed how small the club had become. In the year before the filing, 110,000 people bought something from the Columbia House DVD Club, which is roughly one customer for every 145 members it had at the 1996 peak.
No strategic buyer turned up at the auction. John Lippman took the brand for about $1.5 million and announced a relaunch as a vinyl subscription service for 2016, betting that the record revival wanted a club of its own. "You can see a yearning and an interest to try a new format," he told The Wall Street Journal in 2015.
The vinyl club never shipped a record. What Lippman kept running instead was the DVD business, quietly, for another decade. That is the Columbia House closing in September 2026, and it is still the same brand that sold 16 million Americans their first CDs.
What the club left behind
Columbia House pressed its own editions of other labels' albums for members, which is why so many American record collections hold copies that do not quite match the store version. Those pressings still circulate, along with the catalogs, the order forms and the sheets of stamps members peeled off to choose their twelve titles.
Where to find one today: club-edition LPs and CDs, 1970s and 1980s catalogs and unopened mailers turn up in the vintage ephemera listings on Etsy. Club pressings were made in enormous quantities, so they are one of the cheaper ways to own a piece of the era, and condition matters far more than rarity.
The club's longer legacy is the billing model. The monthly shipment you have to decline, the free trial that renews, the box that ships unless you remember to say no: that is negative option billing, and Columbia House ran it on American teenagers for four decades before subscription software made it ordinary.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Columbia House still around in 2026?
Only for a few more days. Columbia House stops accepting new orders after September 15, 2026, ending 71 years that began with the Columbia Record Club in 1955. Existing memberships and outstanding purchases are being honored while the company winds down, but no new sign-ups are taken after that date.
When did Columbia House stop selling CDs?
Columbia House closed its music club in 2010 and sold only DVDs and Blu-rays after that. The CD club had peaked in 1996 with about 16 million members and roughly $1.4 billion in annual revenue, then lost members through the download and streaming years until the music side was shut for good.
Who owns Columbia House now?
John Lippman has held the Columbia House brand since 2015, when he bought it out of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy of Filmed Entertainment Inc. for about $1.5 million. His announced plan to relaunch Columbia House as a vinyl subscription service in 2016 never shipped, and the DVD club he kept running is the business closing on September 15, 2026.