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11 Records or Cassettes for a Penny? What Could Possibly Go Wrong? The Columbia House Record Club Explained · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: So Kelly, hey Alex.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say it's like 1982, 1981, something like that, and you get a piece of junk mail, and it says that you can buy 13 of something for a penny.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: What would you think?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: What would you think that this is a junk mail for?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: Columbia Record Club.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk about Columbia.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's Columbia House.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Columbia House.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Let's call it Columbia House.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: And uh this was a scheme back uh starting in the 50s for the listeners who didn't know this Columbia House thing.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: You would get this piece of junk mail.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And back in the time period, I'm when we were kids, it would have a little um dotted line in the shape of a penny.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: And you were supposed to take a penny and tape it to that a response envelope.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: Response envelope.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: And then you would you would pick um uh sometimes eleven, sometimes thirteen, sometimes twenty.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: And there were bonus ones, like it'd be oh yeah.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: And if you act before this date, you get five more for free.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And you would get a bunch of music, and so there would be tapes or records or CDs or whatever, depending what year it was.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: And then on the promise that you would continue to buy every month or every so often a certain number of records.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: That sounds familiar to you?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so so the way it worked, I I joined this at one point.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we all did.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the way it worked is after you got your 10 or 15 or whatever it was free or for a penny, then you had to buy 12 more and at full price.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: At full price.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: Plus shipping, plus shipping, and and they would, if you didn't pick one, they would just send you whatever was hot that month.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_01: And so you basically would forget about it, you'd end up with a you know, a cassette of uh Jefferson Starship that you didn't really want.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: And and then if you I think you could send it back, but you had to do it in a certain amount of time they pay shipping.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: They made you they made you jump through a lot of hoops to get out of it at that point.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: So, so but it was brilliant because you know the biggest companies today that well, I say the biggest companies, the valuation on software and and hardware companies is reoccurring revenue, right?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: If you can create reoccurring revenue that will come back every month and you can and it's predictable because of subscriptions, they were doing that.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they did it before before software, before apps on your phone, you know, paying six bucks a month for Netflix or whatever.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: It was they were pioneers in that area.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: They really were, but it all came crashing down.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna describe exactly what happened.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now, my favorite part about the Columbia House, and and they didn't always have this, but you probably remember the they would send you the sheets of stamps.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: It came like this was not a piece of junk mail, this was like a more uh sophisticated piece of mail, and it would, or maybe it was in a magazine that you were reading, and it would have these sheets of stamps, and the stamp would have a picture of the album cover.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Do you remember that?
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, and you would put it on there, and you would pick the 11 records, but it would actually be a picture of the art, the album cover art.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I used to make mixtapes, but I would record off of the radio, you know, the songs that I like, and then I would take those stickers from the Columbia house and I would put them on the label for the mixtapes.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so so it was like a little graphic of the album or whatever.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: So the latest Jefferson uh Starship.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And you can get now the you can get those sheets of stamps.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um you can get like complete sheets on eBay for like 500 bucks.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: You can buy those those un unbottered unused from the 70s and 80s and 90s, those Columbia House.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_00: It'd be so cool to have those stamps, though, wouldn't it?
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: Was Columbia House associated with Columbia Records?
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: And which later was CBS and all that.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: But um, here's the other genius part is that it was junk mail, but guess who used to get the mail after school?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: All the teenagers, right?
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the teenagers were primarily people that were getting the mail, so they'd get this, and it would just, you know, they'd have all these pictures of all the records that you wanted.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And look, it's a different world now.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you're younger than 40, you might not, or maybe 30, you might not remember a time when you had to buy music and you had to buy your music eight eight.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: The physical piece of music.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: Ten songs at a time, and you would save up your money to buy those ten songs, and they would and records when we were kids were like eight, nine bucks, ten bucks, twelve bucks, whatever.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Double album might cost fifteen.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, I remember thinking in increments of eight bucks, like when I can get eight dollars, so I can get a new Bob Seeger record or something, you know.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and the idea that you could get twelve for a penny when you're you know eight years old just blows your mind.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: You can start your collection.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm gonna I'm gonna start my collection.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I think and then you go, well, and then it's not a it wasn't necessarily always recurring, it was just you have to promise to buy, like you said, 12 in the next year.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it wasn't it later on they started just sending them to you.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of underage people joined, and Columbia House did not care.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you could not legally you can't be under 18 and sign away this contract that says I agree to and Columbia House didn't care because at the same time, a lot of people didn't ever purchase the full records, they just got away with getting the and they didn't care about that either.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: I think they thought it was pretty much a wash, it was a loss leader.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, they did not care at all.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, knowing what I know now, I'd like to go back and tell myself, just go ahead and try it.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: They're not gonna put you in jail.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: I was always afraid of getting put in jail.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: I would do it and just use your name.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh, yeah.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Alex did that, not me.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_00: So let me give you a timeline of how this happened.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: 1955 is when this started.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Columbia Record Club.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: They were records being shipped.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: Columbia Record Club, and you would get a free record for joining the club.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, but here was the and here it was another good thing, and I don't know if this is how it worked when we were kids, but I wouldn't be surprised.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the records weren't available until six months after they were released.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: Ah, okay.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: So they were never new that new ones.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Wasn't the latest thing, it was it was six months old.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of inventory that they need to get rid of anyways, right?
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: And by 19, so that was 1955.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: And in 1955, that club sold 700,000 records.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: By 1956, they sold 7 million records.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: One year later, and it was 10% of the whole record market, was just the Columbia Record Club.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_00: Then in 1959, they started the Columbia Real to Real Club.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_01: So you could buy real-to-reel tapes.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just envisioning like the postman trying to carry 13 of those real-to-reel tapes, because that's a lot.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I think, yeah, I know.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: I I think the records were probably 45s when they because I don't think the full albums existed too much in the 50s.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: They were 45s and maybe 78s.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: Those were actually pretty heavy.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Then in 1960, they came up with the Columbia Cartridge Club for eight-track tapes.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: And then in 1969, the Columbia Cassette Club.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: And this is about when that technology was kind of on the forefront.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: 69?
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: The Columbia Cassette Club.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: No, cassettes weren't around in 69.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Were they?
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Columbia Cassette Club.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then they put it all into the Columbia House umbrella in the early 70s.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: And by 1975, there were three million members of members, not record sold, the members of the Columbia House.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Promising to spend$8 or$10 a month, like committing to that.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, by the 80s and 1982, you had the CBS in CBS's Columbia Broadcasting System.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: So you had the CBS Video Club.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And even um former dead end uh CD ROM got into the act.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: They had a CD ROM club that didn't really make it too well.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, in 1988, Sony bought uh Columbia or House, and by then they had six million members, and Time Warner, there was a lot of acquisitions, a lot of people were were buying this.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um Time Warner bought it in 1991.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: 1991 there were 10 million members of the Columbia House.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: And by 1994, it accounted for 15% of all CD sales.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: You think of 1994, that was CD like Apex, right?
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: By 1996, that was kind of the peak of Columbia House.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: There were 16 million members, and this is what kind of blows me away.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: The Columbia House the Columbia House lasted so long that they had a website.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: Those two things don't seem like they existed at the same time to me.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: It feels like websites were were newfangled things, then Columbia House was gone.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: But they intersected at their peak of Columbia House when they had 16 million members, they came out with the Columbia House website.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm sure that made it real easy to pick what albums you wanted, but it's not as fun as this the stickers for sure.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: And and at that point, that's that was kind of like the precursor to downloadable music.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: So all of a sudden you don't need to buy the whole album.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: Or I I remember, Alex, the first time I walked into a computer store.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: I was with my dad, and we were at the microcenter in Houston.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: And if anybody's been to the microcenter, it was the big computer store.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: You can get it was kind of like Fry's, but more focused on computers.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't have like appliances and stuff like that.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: You could go in and get computer parts.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: So my dad built his own computers.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: He liked to do that.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is for people that would turn their nose up at Radio Shack.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yes.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: It was a little more, it was bigger and certainly more hardcore computers.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: But I remember walking in there and they had a PC set up and they had a monitor and it was playing music through these two little, you know, all tech lancing speakers, if you remember those.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: And the computer had, I went over and I think it was Winamp, maybe?
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe this is when Winamp was the media player was I I maybe it wasn't, but whatever it was.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: I started scrolling through and there were hundreds of songs.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: And at that time, hard drive space was like you hardly had any hard drive space.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you might have um you didn't have a gigabyte, you might have like 200 megabytes of hard drive space.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: And wave files, which were the the audio files at the time, would be like 50 gigs.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: So you could maybe on a on a 500, I'm sorry, 50 megabytes wave file, so you might have be able to get 10 songs on a on a 500 megabyte hard drive.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: There were hundreds of songs, and that's when MP3 compression happened, right?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: And they started making these files small, but they still sounded really good.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: I was blown away by that, and I think that's kind of what did in the record industry.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like you told the same story on the CEROM episode.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: We'll have to check that.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Microcenter.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great so it's a great story.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_01: People need to hear it twice.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so they had a better business rating of unsatter business bureau rating of unsatisfactory because of all the shady stuff they were doing.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: You mentioned um sending you things that you didn't ask for, and a lot of that is not is kind of frowned upon.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Some of that's illegal now, too.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: You're because of Columbia House.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: They really treaded the line of of ethical stuff.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, you're you're selling records to eight-year-olds, you're entering into contact contracts with eight-year-old kids or 12-year-old kids.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that's not what killed it.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: By 2000, now we have Amazon, and now we have Walmart and Walmart.com, and you could buy records really cheap from Walmart.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, I think Walmart might still be the the number one seller of of uh CDs.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: C well I'm sure it is the number one.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: They don't sell still sell CDs at Walmart, do they?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, it's funny because my uncle uh still listens to CDs and and I he likes country music, and every so often I try to get him a new CD because he listens to the same stuff over and over again.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the only place I remember going was Best Buy.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like Best Buy had CDs until not too long ago.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: Do they still?
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think so.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: DVDs?
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_00: Do they have DVDs?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: By 2001, music clubs were 8% of sales, so you start seeing it go down.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: But then in 2001, there was a security breach, which couldn't have come at the at a worse time.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: They're already struggling, they're already got competitors uh barking at their heels, and and there was a security breach that exposed thousands of names and credit card numbers and addresses.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: They finally shut down their music operations.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: What year do you think Columbia House stopped their music operations?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: Uh 2003.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: 2009.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Really?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: They were still they were still doing that in 2009.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_00: And they shut down the DVD operations in 2015.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: You could still do a DVD, Columbia House DVDs as late as you know, 2015.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: 2015.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: But then, of course, um, predictably, vinyl came back.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Not huge, but you know, it was a niche, it's a niche hobby, right?
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: And in 2015, Columbia uh announced that they were gonna start a vinyl subscription service.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: So like they were gonna do it all over again with a new set of suckers, but I don't know if that ever took off.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: They announced it in 2015, and in the nine years since I I haven't seen anything else about it.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think that was I don't think vinyl took off the way they thought it might, you know.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: I know that was real popular about 10 years ago.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: Less so now, maybe.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: It is a cool thing that it that it happens, and I think a lot of places a lot of people still press vinyl, but um, I don't know.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't I don't think I I don't think a Columbia House reboot is what anybody needs.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: No, there's a lot of reboots we don't need these days, and and you know, vinyl does have a very distinctive sound, but ultimately it's not about the medium alone, right?
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: If they're just gonna be the vinyl club because okay, you like to listen to music on vinyl, but if you're if they're sending you music you don't like, even if it's on vinyl, you still don't like it, right?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: I would think that most people that are doing vinyl are restocking what they used to have, right?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: Wouldn't you think they're and and stupidly sold at a garage sale for exactly bin for 10 bucks.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm not sure a Columbia House uh reboot um is is a good idea, and I don't think they're going to do it.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: But um I'm looking at an ad here from the 80s, and it says any record or tapes, a dollar.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: It went up to a dollar.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then they have these pictures of all these cassette tapes, and it has like sticks and Sheena Easton and Billy Joel, and I can't read a lot of these, but and it has a picture of you somebody putting a dollar in an envelope, and then the there's a striking image of a box, and these these uh man and a woman are looking at the box and these CDs are just are popping out of it.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I guess they're tapes, and they're just flying out because I mean 11 tapes for a dollar is still just awesome, and a penny was even better.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in my research, I've learned that you didn't actually have to send the penny, they would give you this stuff even if you didn't send the penny.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: Well, here was the other thing, actually, because I remember this from the cassettes.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: I belonged to the cassette club for a period of time, and the cassettes, if you bought the same cassette in the record store, if you went to um what was it, Goody's uh or Sam Goodies?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: Sam Goodies or or Soundware House or you know, Tower Records.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: Record exchange, and you bought the cassette, and then you got the Columbia House cassette.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: The cassettes from Columbia House didn't have like all the liner notes in them.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: The the the paper or the artwork was slightly different.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: It was like they printed it on a different, it wasn't the original printing press.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it was perforated too.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, hey, you could you could it had perfor it was like cheaper, it was cheaper, yeah.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was it was cheaper, it was definitely cheaper, and then I think you know, cassette cassette quality was probably the lowest of records were better uh ultimately.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: Cassettes were just smaller, more portable, but I can remember some of the cassettes just sounding really bad too.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like the Columbia House stuff, yeah.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: They must have just cranked these things out by the thousands.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: I do want to I do want to point out one happy accident that happened with Columbia House Record Club or Cassette Club.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because they did send me stuff, like if you didn't opt out of something coming, they sent it to you.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's the way it worked, is you had to send in something and say, I don't want this month's record or exchange it for this.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: I ended up a pain in the ass.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: And it's all it's all over U.S.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: Postal Service, right?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to write something and put it in an envelope and send it to them.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: You can't go to a website until 1996.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's a it's as difficult as trying to delete an app off your phone that they don't want you to delete or to to unsubscribe from Netflix or whatever.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: Like, are you sure?
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh well, fill out this form.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, I ended up with a cassette that I did not want.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't ask for it.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: It showed up at my house, and I was kind of mad about it, and then I put it in and played it, and I liked it, and I became a fan.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: It was John Mellencamp's uh Pink Houses, and which is actually a great album.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of good songs on that album, uh cassette or whatever.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: You would have never bought that.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: I would have never bought it, and it it did turn me on to it.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think part of it was just uh saying, okay, uh, I'm gonna listen to it.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_01: I I I own it, I might as well put it in and check it out.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, hey, that's a good, pleasant surprise.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, Columbia House, thanks for that.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think that it's uh like a lot of these dead ends, it's dead and buried, and we don't need it again.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_01: But uh well, we have it in so many other ways.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: That that that model of business is is out there in so many ways.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Netflix, right?
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: That's kind of how that started.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: Uh yes, yeah.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: But but that that model of um we'll give you something for free if you will pay way too much for the same thing.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think your local drug dealer would have the same kind of model, right?
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks.