Mail-Order Maelstrom

The book-club system, which accounts for about 10% of all U.S. book sales, has moved into the music field in a big way. Mail-order music clubs have been spinning profitably on the fringes of the record business for ten years, and today they are going stronger than ever, may now account for as much as 15% of the LP business. Their method resembles the book clubs': full-page ads in the Sunday supplements, often dominated by the word "FREE!" in doughnut lettering. The usual deal: subscribers get a record free for joining up, or for every two they buy.

Early mail-order music clubs included the high-minded Concert Hall Society and the Young People's Record Club. Biggest of today's houses, with fluctuating memberships as high as 225,000: Musical Masterpiece Society, Music Treasures of the World and the Book-of-the-Month Club's Music-Appreciation Records. All of them have had the same disadvantages: no regular big-name performers and merely average sound quality. Nonetheless, they operate at a tidy profit, and some are trying hard to improve their wares, e.g., the Book-of-the-Month Club has begun releasing topnotch Angel disks, such as Debussy's La Mer, and has made a deal with New York's Metropolitan Opera for Met cast recordings. Last week Columbia Records, one of the biggest major labels, lowered itself into the mail-order maelstrom, announced its own record club with a million-dollar advertising campaign. In a five-page letter to its dealers Columbia explained that the record clubs are offering "the tremendous inducements . . . heretofore unheard of royalty guarantees" to artists in an effort to lure them away from the big companies. The only way to meet this competition. Columbia decided, was to swing a club of its own, and it offered dealers 20% of the retail price of records bought by every new member they bring in. Columbia is tooled up to service 500,000 subscribers (about 5% of U.S. LP phonograph owners) with performances by Columbia's own stars in jazz, pop, film and classical fields. For every two records bought the subscriber gets one specially pressed disk free. First classical bonus: Sir Thomas Beecham conducting "Great 19th Century Overtures."

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