Confessions of an record club addict

BMG Music Service is no more. They announced that they will stopping the service effective June 30, 2009. The news of their closing follows Columbia House, which folded a couple years ago.

I'm showing my age here, but I remember when BMG Music Service was RCA Music Club. RCA was always was less intimidating than Columbia. With RCA you got six or seven free albums and then had to buy one. Columbia offered 12 albums, but then you had to buy six or seven. With shipping and handling charges of a couple bucks per album, and "regular club prices" of $10.98 or $11.98 for a album or cassette, by the time you did the math you really weren't coming out ahead with Columbia. But RCA/BMG was almost always a much better deal.

I remember how excited I was the first time I cut out the form from the Columbia House ad featured on the back of a Parade Magazine in the Sunday newspaper. I'd carefully fill out the form, double checking the numbers to make sure I copied them down correctly and wasn't ordering Culture Club instead of Motley Crue. Finally I'd drop the card in the mail and anxiously await for my box of albums to arrive. I'd run home from school everyday to check, and it wasn't too long before it arrived. My first shipment consisted of the following records, and I do mean records- albums, vinyl, 12 inch:

Ratt- Out of the Cellar
Billy Squier- Signs of Life
Motley Crue- Shout at the Devil
Dio- The Last in Line
Huey Lewis and the News- Sports
Masters of Metal compilation
Twisted Sister- You Can't Stop Rock and Roll
ZZ Top- Eliminator
The Cars- Heartbreak City
Sammy Hagar- VOA

There had to be a couple more, but those are all I can come up with. It amazes me that they're so memorable, but really why should it? I've been into music my whole life, and this was certainly a way to dive headfirst into the deep end. It was like Christmas, except that I can't remember ever waking up to find 12 albums under the tree. I remember my dad picking up Dio's The Last in Line and saying, "This looks like hell...," so I can't really picture my mom picking out Shout at the Devil or Out of the Cellar for a stocking stuffer.

I remember my dad frowning on the idea of me joining a record club, but at the same time he was aware that I hadn't entered into any legal contract and was a minor. They weren't going to come after me if I didn't hold my end of the bargain, which I don't think I ever did with Columbia House.

Was anybody seriously interested in the "selection of the month?" I remember their language quite clearly. "If you would like to purchase the selection of the month do nothing. It will be sent to you automatically." I had checked "hard rock" as my category, which included everything from Motley Crue and Twisted Sister to Bob Seger and Bruce Springsteen. You had to be quick with the reply cards in order to stop the selection of the month from being mailed to you. And when you're a kid finding a stamp is a pain, especially when you're trying to hide from your parents that you're still in a record club. Or worse yet, you've joined another one.

It didn't take me long to discover a fool proof way to get out of the record clubs, even if that wasn't my intention. Having missed the deadline on my "I do not want the selection of the month. Send nothing" response card, I inevitably ended up receiving a few selections of the month in my hard rock category. Rather than keep John Cougar Mellencamp's Scarecrow and pay $11.98 + $2.00 shipping and handling, I soon found an easier way to solve my problem. You take a sharpie and you write "Refused. Return to Sender" on the package and you drop it in a big blue mailbox. Problem solved.

Of course the record companies hated this. They certainly didn't appreciate the fact that they were getting charged twice for each shipment. A couple letters eventually came before they terminated my membership. No final bills. Just silence. "No more selections of the month for you kid." But I didn't have to purchase my 5-6 records at "regular club prices' either.

RCA was so much more manageable. Even as a kid I could see myself holding up my end of that agreement. Get six free. Buy one. Get two more free. That was part of it. There was an enticement. Buy one and we'll send you two more. They're catalog wasn't as good, and sometimes with all the free albums coming my way I had a hard time figuring out what I wanted. Still it allowed me to complete my catalogs of U2 and Van Halen albums and explore 80's pop drivel like, well, Phil Collins and the Thompson Twins with little investment. Half of my cassettes probably came from RCA. Buy your one album? Get two more free. Sign up a friend? Four free. It was never ending. Then, after buying your one album you were free to quit and sign up all over again. Use your initials instead of your first name. Deliberately misspell your last name. Every little trick seemed to work. I had friends who claimed that they used neighbors addresses and fake names to get their shipments. I was never that brazen, but hey, there's a reason my full name isn't on this site. Wouldn't want BMG coming after me after all this time.

I've always been into an album's packaging. Sitting down with an album and getting lost in the cover and lyrics was an important part of the listening experience. Because the record companies manufactured their own titles, the packaging often got the shaft. It was most noticeable on cassettes. With their minimal real estate for packaging, the clubs would cut it down the images on tapes even further. Gone would be the fold out inserts. The album cover reduced to white with a tiny reproduction of the album cover and huge block type with the name and the artist. Eventually I learned that if you ordered RCA titles, the actual albums on their label, not the one's that were licensed to them, you got the real product. Actual artwork. Everything. These title didn't have the "Manufactured under contract by RCA Music Service" stamp on them either, so you could "return" them to Musicland and pick out something else, claiming it was a gift from your Uncle. This worked a couple times.

Eventually I got sick of the clubs. I had fast food dough and didn't want to wait six months for a new album to show up with a hatchet job of packaging. I had discovered good record stores. I could ride my bike and buy a new cassette for $7.99 the day it came out.

I revisited RCA, which was by then known as BMG, in college. Cds were dominating the market and I needed to catch up. I remember my shipment contained Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and Concrete Blonde's Bloodletting. Beyond that I'm drawing a blank. I think I bought my one disc, got a couple more free and got out. And I'm sure I returned at least one selection of the month by refusing it and returning it to the sender via the big blue mailbox.

A couple years ago I flirted with the record club yet again. Now known at yourmusic.com, BMG offered cds at $5.99 a title. You had to buy one each month, but there was no obligation. Cancel anytime. And you could buy as many as you wanted. The only catch was that if you didn't have something lined up in your purchase queue you'd be charged $5.99 a month regardless. It was great for boxsets. I bought the Dylan remasters...14 or 15 of them all in a box for $5.99 a disc. I think it's now $6.99 a title and apparently is not closing down. I got out of it though. I couldn't find enough that interested me that I didn't already have.

I wonder if a similar model would work for today's kids. It seems like it would be a fool proof model for digital music. Make signing up contingent on a credit card number. But really, what fun would that be? They'd be missing out on the best part: ripping open that box, tearing off the cellophane, opening up the gatefold sleeve of all of those albums and thinking it's the greatest day ever.