What to do?

[Aggie87]

I will start off by saying I having purchased CDs from many different Sellers here and have NEVER had what I would consider a bad experience. Some better than others, of course, but never a bad experience. If someone is a regular contributer to the Board they generally guard their reputation carefully.....

That said, I find that the really rare issues, those that bring top dollar on ebay, are often the hardest ones for me to know how to get rid of. If you offer them at low prices there are a few people here that are only in interested in them to make a profit. If you sell it to them, a week later you see them on ebay for three times the price you received.

If you offer the rare ones for trade only, most of the time, you will not receive offers of comparable value because people do not want to get rid of their rarest items......therefore, they have nothing to trade.

Finally, if you ask people to make an offer they generally respond asking you to list a price. A fair price is pretty hard to determine. You can go to half.com or amazon and see if they have one listed but generally those prices are over the top and it is questionable if the item will ever sell for that price. If you look for a relatively current ebay sale they may, or may not, have a recent comparable sale. ...

I currently have duplicates of some very hard cds to find that I have been holding for awhile because of this quandry..I may just offer them for a price that looks fair to me and ask anyone interested to make an offer at a different price if interested and see what happens. I know people on the board would like first crack at these without having to deal with ebay, but like I said, the rarest ones are the hardest ones for me to deal with.

Good luck. Hope to see you list them here soon.

My first preference is to offer thing up for trade here on this board. I've enjoyed alot of the music I've received in trading with fellow board members, and am glad when my cd's go to someone here that also might enjoy them.

I'm not in this for the money, so trades for me are preferred over sales every day. I have found I have some things in the past that could be considered rare, and have traded for things from other people that are also rare. In these cases we try to make trades of roughly equal value. Sometimes things work out where we make a 2 for 1 trade, or even 3 for 1, depending on the item. It has worked for me both ways.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

Interesting, but it seems more and more people are starting to sell off their collections. Looks like with all the downloads and ipods and MP3s and such, the cd is on its way out. It's hard now to get big prices on cds on ebay or elsewhere.

While some of that is happening, I think with many folks here you do the math with the following factors: life expectancy with good hearing, amount of time for listening, square footage of storage space available, and current inventory of cds. If you own several thousand CDs (heck, even just 1000) and you're over 40, there's a chunk of music that may never get played again. Might as well start culling the collection (to free up space & cash to buy more! )

I think your numbers are way off Q. And with retirement, one has more time to listen to music.

I play an average of in the region of 3,000 different albums in a year. That, naturally, allows for newies to be played quite a lot, and the total is sensitive to the number of new albums I buy. But there are only 36 albums that I haven't listened to for ten years or more, most often because they're a bit fucked, y'know.

MG

[Kevin Bresnahan]

Interesting, but it seems more and more people are starting to sell off their collections. Looks like with all the downloads and ipods and MP3s and such, the cd is on its way out. It's hard now to get big prices on cds on ebay or elsewhere.

It ain't necessarily so!

http://cgi.ebay.com/MOSAIC-CD-BOX-Ike-Queb...1QQcmdZViewItem

I smell a shill! This is exactly why eBay's recent switch to "Bidder 1", "Bidder 2", etc. is very bad for the buyers. There is no way to know if the bidders are all legit. I'd bet that the winner is a shill. Look at his bid history. All books. Not someone who should be whipping down insanely stupid money for a Mosaic box.

[sidewinder]

And with retirement, one has more time to listen to music.

Indeed - I find that I am stocking up partly with 'retirement' in mind.

Just think of all those CDs and LPs that MG and Brownie are playing every day.

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

And with retirement, one has more time to listen to music.

Indeed - I find that I am stocking up partly with 'retirement' in mind.

Just think of all those CDs and LPs that MG and Brownie are playing every day.

Better than being a grumpy old man.

MG

[neveronfriday]

You could also look at it this way:

Lately I've read a ton of articles popping up right and left that talk about the demise of the CD within 2 to 5 years. Already now, when I look around, it's clear that the CD is a format of the past and will - just like the LP - be relegated to its niche.

The future is downloading, storing your files digitally, whatever.

I'm not going to go along with another format change and I do not trust digital files (I've had too many expensive backup solutions fail over a comparatively short period of time).

Soooo,

I'm holding on to my CDs and once I'm gone, although it's not a nice thought, I don't really give a damn about what happens to my collection.

Half of my collection was bought when I was still married and a larger part of that I probably won't be listening to again (or it was never my kind of music anyways), but I'll hold on to it for two reasons:

a) Perhaps, I might enjoy some of it when I'm old and demented

b) or the future CD niche market will cough up (much) better prices.

Already now some hard-core collectors are paying premium prices for original CDs released in the 80s and early 90s, simply because they want to avoid the "loudness" problem of many more recenty or recently remastered CDs.

I might be wrong, but quite a bit of the music - if it's from the time period above - will probably go for quite a bit more in a few years.

Just my 2 or 3 cents.

Edited March 28, 2007 by neveronfriday