That’s the kind of money that made dumb people feel smart.” You have the biggest fucking markup in retail history, and somehow in one winter, the music business-with Phillips leading the way-said, “Hey, that $7.99 album you love? Guess what? Your lucky day: You get to buy it for $18.99, it’s going to sound worse, and you have to buy fucking pieces of equipment.” And everyone said, “Great, I’d like to buy more of them please.” And so there was this incredible surplus of money. We went to his Fifth Avenue townhouse, gorgeous space, and he said-maybe I’ll give it away if I can do his accent properly-but he said, “You know what this is? This right here? It’s stupid money.
What we had in the ’90s was… what another very famous, huge record executive in a very, very hilarious way. It’s all one thing, and they’re completely aligned against the artist in every case.” I was talking to someone who was handwringing about Spotify, a fellow musician who wrote an editorial, and when we were talking about the whole thing, he said, “You know, there’s no reason to yell at any particular party, because they all have equity in each other. SFJ: There’s a lot to talk about in that it mirrors the larger economy… You know, all the mergers that happened at the corporate level are now happening at the musical level. That’s the entry point into the below conversation. They also reminisce about all the characters they worked with, including one man (featured in The Target Shoots First) whose windowless office featured stacks and stacks of paper printouts, piled haphazardly on every available surface.
Each participant in the call had a hand in producing the colorful catalogs that were mailed to members, the ones listing hundreds and hundreds of CDs and cassettes available to purchase in a given month. The quartet immediately jumps into conversation, covering the quirks of their time at the company with plenty of laughter (and, on occasion, some cynicism). That comes up time and again when Wilcha and several of his Columbia House co-workers-former New Yorker pop critic/musician Sasha Frere-Jones, author/teacher Alysia Abbott, and journalist/editor/content strategist Piotr Orlov-hop on a conference call with The A.V. Twenty years after it was filmed, what’s incredible about Wilcha’s documentary is how the experience of working at Columbia House informs (and, at times, even parallels) the modern media landscape.
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