No More Music Clubs

I first started buying music cassettes in the late 80s, going from jr. high to high school. I joined Columbia House which had a great introductory offer--something like 12 tapes for 1 cent--and further good deals after meeting the membership commitment of purchasing a few additional titles at regular club price. From the time I joined them I remained till the end and acquired quite a collection of tapes and later, cd's.

Sometime thereafter joining Columbia House, I joined BMG Music Service, at which point I had switched over to purchasing cd's. The move to buying cd's wasn't so much my own personal choice. I enjoyed working with tapes, though I was well aware of their shortcomings and delicateness. It was more of a forced move as cassettes were being phased out. Looking back on it all, I definitely prefer cd's and wish I had never even began to buy tapes. But at the time there was quite a difference in price and money was not as readily available to me. Thus, I still have a great number of cassettes even after parting with many through ebay and other individuals. I have converted nearly all of the ones I still have to .wav files and cd.

Anyway, as a result of my memberships in those 2 clubs, I have amassed a large collection of tapes, cd's and plenty of boxed sets as well. They offered unbeatable prices especially on those boxed sets.

Then in 2005, BMG acquired Columbia House and there was one less music club to be a member of. But BMG still offered plenty of great deals and I continued purchasing (and getting free) many albums from them. Until they shutdown sometime in 2009 and became YourMusic.com, which was an online only store. No more mailers. I rarely purchased from YourMusic.com. The deals were not bad but no longer as wonderful. And now at the end of this month it will be shutting down as well. I guess people are just not buying cd's anymore. They're going the route of downloading.

I know that I haven't been buying many cd's lately. But it's not because I am choosing to download instead. It's due to having bought so many while I was in those 2 clubs and from Amazon and CDUniverse as well that I haven't even been able to listen to all of them. I was just accumulating cd's for the sake of accumulating them. I'm now looking to downsize my music library a bit and perhaps keep only the titles that are meaningful to me.

As far as the cassettes go, well, it's hard for me to part with all of them even though I have transferred them all to cd. As I said, I have already sold a good number of them, but I'm still hanging on to a little less than 200 total. Some are not available on cd so I want to keep those. Maybe I'll take some pictures of them and upload them here.