On June 29, 2011, the last remnant of what was once Columbia House — the mightiest mail-order record club company that ever existed — quietly shuttered for good. Other defunct facets of the 20th-century music business have been properly eulogized, but it seems that nary a tear was shed for the record club. Perhaps ... a new generation of music fans who had never known a world without the Internet couldn't grasp the marvel that was the record club in its heyday. From roughly 1955 until 2000, getting music for free meant taping a penny to a paper card and mailing it off for 12 free records — along with membership and the promise of future purchasing.

The rise and fall of the Columbia Record House club--and how we learned to steal music.
posted by Horace Rumpole on Nov 14, 2011 - 99 comments

1,000 Albums to hear before you die compiled from The Guardian's assorted music reviewers (assisted by readers who then told them which ones they missed). You won't want to be planning to expire any time too soon with these to get through.
posted by rongorongo on Mar 13, 2008 - 114 comments

"With VinylVideo™, you can now transform your old record player and your TV set into a brand-new home movie medium - quickly, conveniently, and without complicated instruction manuals. With the revolutionary VinylVideo™ Picture Disks, for which numerous top-name artists have already produced exclusive works, you can now design your own TV viewing program featuring picture quality that is truly extraordinary." Hey hey that sounds useful! Maybe their next big idea is replacing DVDs with Viewmaster reels. Check out the real audio informercial if you have the chacne.
posted by Stan Chin on Feb 24, 2003 - 8 comments

Pazz & Jop 2002 - The Village Voice has tabulated the top albums and singles from 695 critics (and 10,2002 LPs). Some of the ballot-fillers even got a little personal. The usual essays are included. If your fav CD didn't make the cut, perhaps it made it onto the dean's list.
posted by boost ventilator on Feb 11, 2003 - 28 comments

Today, the music critics at pitchfork.com posted the first half of their "Top 100 Albums of the 1980s" feature.
posted by Pinwheel on Nov 18, 2002 - 51 comments

When LPs Roamed The Earth: classic album covers for records you have almost certainly never heard of.
posted by pascal on Aug 1, 2001 - 21 comments