You remember Columbia House as “that CDs-by-mail company” because, as Forbes pointed out in 2015, CD sales in general were an absolute feeding frenzy in the mid-90s. Columbia House was positioned to cash in on CD mania, and did, raking in a reported $1.4 billion in revenue in 1996. But as the Hollywood Reporter pointed out in 2015, the CD era was a corporate sugar high, and things soured afterward—long before music streaming came along. Even after making the extremely on-brand move of transitioning to selling DVDs, Columbia House started bouncing from parent company to parent company, until revenue reportedly dropped to $17 million in 2014, the year before its bankruptcy.
— Read on gizmodo.com/r-i-p-columbia-house-heres-how-it-improbably-survived-this-long-2000799621