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All Songs +1: Marking The Demise Of 'The Spotify Of The '80s'

One of many ads run by Columbia House during its heyday.
Mushy
/
Flickr
One of many ads run by Columbia House during its heyday.

Columbia House (actually, the company that has owned Columbia House since 2012) filed for bankruptcy this week, which will mean a great deal to those who were music lovers in the 1980s and '90s, and probably close to nothing to listeners under the age of 30. Columbia House was a mail-order music warehouse, which used cheap (or free) LPs, then 8-tracks, then cassettes and CDs to rope customers into its full-price subscription service. For this week's All Songs +1 podcast, Robin (who, like millions of other Americans, has Columbia House to thank for his Hootie & The Blowfish collection) is joined by NPR Music's Stephen Thompson and Piotr Orlov, who was a Columbia House employee in its '90s heyday.

In this freewheeling discussion, the team talks about the nuts and bolts of the Columbia House model (it's been called "the Spotify of the '80s"), how young music fans tried to work the system, and how Stephen somehow missed the massive reach of Columbia House altogether.

Were you ever a Columbia House member? What music did you discover? What do you wish you'd never heard? Share your memories in the comments below.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Robin Hilton is a producer and co-host of the popular NPR Music show All Songs Considered.
Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)
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