How many of you ordered cassettes from these two mail-order music places? I think I still owe Columbia House for like 60 cassettes I got using two different addresses. I only paid $.02. I was 13. Good times.
Like a money order where you fill in a Form and you fill in item 45299274902 but you end up getting 45299274901 because your 1 looked like a 2?
I think that's how I ended up getting the Stattler Brothers Greatest Hits when I was a kid. All of the kids on my road - that I hung out with - ribbed me for weeks singing like brother with the really deep voice
I've never heard of them, nor do I know who sings this song but I'm just going to re-enactment. OOOOOOOlllllld MmmAaaaaaan RIVVVVERRRRR
forgot all about them and never did. mostly, well partially it was poverty but also, my impression, from columbia house anyway, i don't thing i'd ever heard of bmg, was that what they had on offer was top 40, which just never really did interest me all that much. well in the late 60s and early 70s there were some interesting things, interesting kinds of music becoming popular, but by then, the whole top 40 way of looking at things, was, i thought, thankfully faiding away. on alternative radio you could find things like world beat and hearts of space, celtic cadenc and thistle and shamroc, and of course filk, the folk music of people who hadn't been born yet, of worlds and settings from works of fiction, (especially works of science fiction) and of course the sort of mainstream music publishers association and all that, you know, acted like the kind of music that interested me, like to them, it didn't even exist at all. and it certainly, at least my impression, correct me if i'm wrong, but wasn't anything they'd even be aware existed, let alone distribute, which was good, because being ignored allowed truly creative people to continue, relatively unimpeded, to create. today the music that i listen to comes from people who give their work away free themselves, knowingly and intentionally. and really that's the only kind of world i want to live in, where all forms of art are completely open and universally accessible means of communication, instead of everything having to be about money, and the whole perspective that comes with that.
Many times, I paid my bill tho. They wasnt that much, and I lived near a National Record Mart. And cassette and albums cost much more there. I believe I had the best collection in my neighborhood among friends. I remember my dads friend borrowing Queen News of the World. I used them another time in the 2000s.
I remember when somebody else ordered CDs from one of them with my family's personal info; I don't remember how it went down but I got the impression we paid... It always seemed to me that I didn't care for their catalogue that much; though they had nearly everything. I guess something just seemed off.
Before Columbia CD was Columbia Record Club. Limited artist selection, lots of covers (as I recall from my youth). If you did not send in your requests in time, you got a bunch of crap Selections of the Month that were a pain to send back. Nearly impossible to cancel a subscription.
