Columbia House, the former mail-order music giant that helped create whole album collections for a penny, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Monday, blaming streaming music and videos for its demise.
Columbia House has watched revenues decline every year since reaching its peak of $1.4 billion in revenues in 1996. Today, the company is taking in a fraction of that at $17 million in revenue in 2014, Glenn Langberg, of Filmed Entertainment Inc., which owns
Columbia House, said, according to The Wall Street Journal.
"This decline is directly attributable to a confluence of market factors that substantially altered the manner in which consumers purchase and listen to music, as well as the way consumers purchase and watch movies and television series at home," Langberg said in court papers filed in the case.
Columbia House listed its total assets at about $2 million against total liabilities of roughly $63 million owed to more than 250 creditors, according to The Journal. The company owes more than $30 million from long-term pension liabilities plus another $7 million in unsecured trade debt and royalty payments due to film studios, stated the newspaper.
Rolling Stone magazine reported that Columbia House stopped selling music in 2010, acknowledging it could not compete with MP3 players or streaming or illegal downloads, which made selling CDs a money-losing effort.
The company focused on DVDs and still boasted about 110,000 members, but the emergence of Netflix and other streaming services has put that service in jeopardy as well, reported Rolling Stone.
Music listeners of a certain age shared their memories of Columbia House on social media.