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Selling an 800+ CD lot: My experience

bargainguy

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We're packing our house in preparation for a move. That means I had to come to terms with my 800+ CD collection, as it was not coming along.

All my discs have been archived to FLAC files, so I don't need the physical copy anymore. But there is residual value in the physical copy, so why not sell them?

The question became - how do I sell these discs? Do I do it one at a time? Do I sell in bunches? How does this work?

Recently I came across a fellow who buys and resells discs for a living. Didn't know that was a thing!

Told him my dilemma. He says: Sell them all in one lot, and take a huge hit just to get rid of all of them at once. This is what resellers are looking for.

For an 800+ CD lot, he suggested a price of $300. This assumes all the discs are in good order, not missing, mismatched, duplicates, scratched up, etc.

So I constructed a Facebook Marketplace ad. Took a couple pix of the whole lot and posted.

Some interest, but people wanted to know exactly which CDs they were getting. So I switched strategies and put all the CD's in 10 boxes, then took pix of each box so all titles were clearly visible.

That's when interest really perked up. But here's the strange thing - the people who showed interest were not resellers, but instead regular folks just wanting to add to their collection.

The fellow who purchased them today already amassed a collection of 6000+ CDs. But he had specific interest in some of the bands I had near-complete collections of.

So I prepared the lot with resellers in mind, but in the end sold them to someone who just really wanted the music, not a profit margin.

Don't know if this will help anyone here with their music dilemma, but it worked for me.
 
I'm glad things worked-out for you... and for the buyer! (In a free market everybody wins!!!)

It IS is a copyright violation since you have still a copy, but it "seems better" than throwing them in a landfill. ;)

Funny story - I bought a used VHS concert because it was not available digitally. I paid around $20 for it and when it arrived it had a Goodwill price tag on it for $1.99! I didn't mind because I wouldn't have found it at my local Goodwill and I wanted it.

...Somebody told me there are people who go to thrift shops and make a list (take pictures?) and post the records/tapes/CDs/DVDs for sale online without actually buying them first. I have no idea if that was the case in my transaction.
 
There are "pickers" who shop thrift stores and the like for certain items, and do this as a living.

I've run into them. They typically have a specific interest and a waiting market, but it all depends on finding the right items at the right price.

For ex., in my town, a company called Retrospekt takes old Polaroid SX-70 cameras and refurbishes them with modern updates and graphics, then charges a boatload of money for doing just that.

An SX-70 in almost any condition is worth buying cheap for them, because it's the base of their business. So that's the type of thing a photo-minded picker would almost always buy if the price is right.
 
Now that you don't have rights to your FLAC collection (which to be fair I think was a copyright violation anyway but universally acepted), you can save a fortune by just pirating and downloading music you never bought.

How much did you get out of interest?

One of my hobbies is trawling thrift stores for $1 CDs.
Unfortunately most are old people music, older than me anyway, as I presume deceased estates are the main source for these stores.
 
Don't know if this will help anyone here with their music dilemma, but it worked for me.
It all just depends on market swings.
I did the same selling all my LP's and CD's to resalers in 2010

I did very well selling my CD's as they're value, specially for things like the MoFi and imports, was still very high.
That retailer has probably takin it in the rear on a lot of his purchase if he didn't sell them pretty fast.

Compared to today, my LP's didn't fetch very high, no one wanted them in 2010.
The retailer probably made out like a bandit if he held them for a few years. LOL

Ten or 15 years from now we could be looking at the CD revival and LP's may be in the toilet.
People and the market are very fickle
Anyway, it makes no difference to me, I have near 4k albums on hard-drive in 16-44.1 flacs or better.
Mostly the only thing I lay out money for today are multich Blu-Rays and downloads.
 
I got the $300 originally asked for.

Around here, I had much better luck finding CDs at rummage sales than thrift stores. People tend to give away the discs they don't want, so the selection can often be quite narrow - lots of Christmas music and the like.

Going rate for CDs at rummage sales here is 50 cents to a dollar. But I find that as people sell their CDs cheap at rummages, they sell off complete or near-complete collections of their favorite artists, just like I did! The chances of finding something like that at a thrift store are much less in my area.
 
I volunteer at the local library for bi-monthly "book" sales that also include audio-video media. We accept books, CDs, DVDs, Blu-Rays, audio books and sheet music and sell them for very cheap. So, these are items that we receive for free and usually sell for a buck. I help with the weekly sorts of donations and the bi-monthly sales. I have bought a fair number of CDs this way. Most of the CDs I've bought over the last year have been from Ebay. A lot are going for considerably less that the original full price and what I've been buying are classical titles. Some are sealed and new. Somehow, I doubt that the "very good" CDs got FLACed, though there's no way to know for sure. One thing for sure, the price of Classical music on CDs has been in freefall for the last twenty years.
 
I got the $300 originally asked for
You probably did as well as could be done with a bulk sale today.
Since you still have all the music on the drives, you lost very little.
The only thing I regret is that I didn't enter enough meta type info into my rips.
The barcode #s or other info to at least would have allowed my to go back and look up exactly which version of each album I had. Year of mix release, mastering engineer, that kind of thing. So many times I've wondered about those things with no way
to exactly ID the rip.
Just some food for thought to others ripping.
 
Damn... one of benefits of listening to mainstream music is you can get 800 cds for 300 $ , instead i still have many cds in my wantlist that will cost me 100-150$ each and im totally willing to pay.
 
instead i still have many cds in my wantlist that will cost me 100-150$ each and im totally willing to pay.
Hopefully the music is available streaming ?
 
I loved collecting and playing CDs until I discovered REW and added EQ in roon. Now playing the physical copy has dramatically inferior sound quality vs the digital rips or streaming. I know I could solve this with a minidsp 2x4, but haven't felt the motivation to do so.
 
Damn... one of benefits of listening to mainstream music is you can get 800 cds for 300 $ , instead i still have many cds in my wantlist that will cost me 100-150$ each and im totally willing to pay.
There are rare limited production CDs in all genres of music that could command thousands of dollars each to collectors. Fact is most mass produced CDs have little monetary value though. It’s more about the scarceness of the CD than it is quality of recording.
 
After Amazon buys Spotify, and Apple gets Tidal, Dweezer and Qobuz and Disney merges with YouTube they will start charging by the song so I'm keeping mine and buying more new and used. They going to be worth a fortune. ;)
 
I spent well over a decade selling off my >3000-CD collection individually mostly on Amazon Marketplace. It was a totally crazy expenditure of time processing each transaction and weighing and shipping each CD in a mailer, but because it was spread out over many years, it didn’t feel as bad as it could have. And prior to this, I had spent 3 years individually ripping each one to FLAC files. Not to mention all the time I spent originally purchasing these CDs, especially in the early days, when I would drive an hour to Los Angeles and then spend the whole day driving around to various record stores to track down rare imports, and repeat this process a couple of times a month. People today have it so easy. The amount of time, money, and effort I invested in my music collection totally dwarfs the amount I invested in my audio gear, but I consider that the correct proportion.
 
There are rare limited production CDs in all genres of music that could command thousands of dollars each to collectors. Fact is most mass produced CDs have little monetary value though. It’s more about the scarceness of the CD than it is quality of recording.
Sure .. records i am after are just regular non-remastered original editions / early reissues from 80s and 90s , 20 years ago i could have most of them for few dollars as well but nowadays the demand to supply ratio causes prices to be high. Too bad im a collector and have this imperative to have physical format ( i mostly play cds ripped to flacs as well so it makes even less sense )
 
2. if you are hardcore fan and physical collector u are repulsed by the notion of streaming
Repulsed? That's a bit extreme.
I stream very little, but it's a wonderful alternative for being able to listen to something you can't locate otherwise or
preview before an actual purchase.

3. if it is available on streaming its almost always a third remaster of a loudness wars remaster
For the music you claim to be so rare, expensive, and esoteric.
I highly doubt it was ever part of the loudness wars.
That crap is mostly limited to the every day popular varieties.
Your extremely negative view of streaming seems a bit distorted and possibly the result of no hands on experience.
Whatever ____________
 
Selling in bulk always means a financial loss. The only way to sell at a profit is to sell individually and on dedicated forums such as Discogs, where collectors are likely to look.
 
Selling in bulk always means a financial loss. The only way to sell at a profit is to sell individually and on dedicated forums such as Discogs, where collectors are likely to look.
That only make sense for high dollar rare issues though. Ones time and attention are very valuable commodities in my world. :cool:
 
Come to think of it, I did sell a disc separately from the 800+ bulk sale recently.

I got $50 for a 24K gold CD of Rush's Moving Pictures on MoFi.

I remember getting that one at a rummage sale, where that disc was sitting in a box of others, all marked 6 CDs for $1. And it was in mint condition, of course.
 
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