The Odd Price of Music

I am selling CDs I'll probably never play again on my Discogs store and am sometimes surprised at the prices that things actually go for, although you can price at any level and it's only good if you actually make a sale, but on my latest additions there were a few surprises:

• The Cramps "Off The Bone / Songs The Lord Taught Us" around £4
• Roger Daltrey "Moonlighting" up to £60
• Louis Jordan "The Anthology" £30

I could obviously unload via CEX or Music Magpie and get 20p a CD if I'm lucky, but I use Discogs to sell and price and sometimes get several times the original purchase price.

Again the thing is I might see a CD priced at £250 on Amazon like "The Handy Wah Whole" but you have to want to sell the item AND you need a buyer. Sometimes these things come together and you find a buyer, I remember selling a copy of "Anarchy In The UK" for £25 in the early eighties after they went from EMI to A&M to Virgin and then bought the LP for a couple of quid leaving me twenty pound to the good.

I tend to love the music rather than the format and as long I can listen to it then that's OK by me.

I do realise that I have bought records mainly to support the artist, resulting in a very large collection that is now subject to a very slow cull, I don't need to sell it , and any CD that is priced less than two quid goes to the charity shops.

I'm not sure how much these are on Amazon but you can see on the list below.

It's quite early but I am feeling a bit iffy like I'm coming down with something, hopefully a night's sleep will sort me out.

200

This is post 200 this year , which means 2019 is, so far, my fourth highest posting year since I started. This week I will hit my two thousandth post. I hit my thousandth post , here, in November 2015, eight and a half years after my first post here.  . So my second thousand post has taken about four years so I have doubled my posting rate, which my be a good or bad thing , possibly quantity of quality. You can check the first against the thousandth against this one and see if there has been any improvement at all.

I just got my latest bill from Discogs and I'm now selling about two CDs a week, which is quite impressive as often they are going for above ten pounds, way above the 17p I would get from CEX or Music Magpie. That's nothing against those companies, because they have to take the hit of the stuff they can't sell and then have to hold what they have until they actually sell the things. The latest one will be posted off to Germany this morning.

Today is another sunny day, and I am going to take myself off to work soon so I know this is short, but this won't feature Nico for a change.

I opened the curtains and there was a big fly on the window, but then I noticed it was outside so that was a good start.

So what are we going to have music wise? Just noticed the Faces box that my daughters got me for a birthday, so we'll go for a live take of "That's All You Need" one of my favourite slide guitar rock songs , and this is very rough but totally brilliant.

Enjoy your Tuesday

DAT's Your Lot

About twenty five years ago greedy  record companies made a fortune turning people from tape and vinyl to CD on the pretext that the sound quality was excellent and CDs were indestructable and you could smear them with jam and they would still play. Well think of the logistics !!  What really sold CD to the masses was the MacDonalds like convenience of being able to program tracks , skip tracks you didnt like and repeat ones you did as well as random play.

These facilities were actually available on tape and vinyl players , but when a friend of mine demonstrated it on hi cassette player they was a lot of rewinding and fast forwarding .

Anyway , I digress , what has brought this post on on is the re issue by Rhino of Fleetwood Mac's excellent retrospective The Chain , which I bought in its original incarnation about twenty years back. I've been playing it today and very good it is too.

No , after the initial , virtual investment free windfall of CD (records already recorded and often not remastered, remasters were another wave of cash) , they began to circulate rumours of CD decay , and your everlasting CDs would in fact crumble to dust withing five years. To combat this you had to switch to DAT , expensive players , and back to tape with it's inherent fragility and at the the time blank DAT's were as expensive as a full price CD!! This time the public didnt fall for it, and where is DAT now ?

Twenty years on my copy of the Chain is in fine fettle , and CDs are still an excellent and portable storge medium and there are some excellent packages out there . I recently purchased a superb Emerson Lake and Palmer box for around £15 .

So CD is still as bouyant as ever , Vinyl has made and amazing recovery ,  Newcastle still has 3 or 4 real record shops plus HMV and That's Entertainment (The outlet for Music Magpie)  , and music is still brilliant.

Have a nice day!!

Second Hand Plan - HMV , Poundland and Magpies

Many moons ago Music Magpie started buying CDs and DVDs from people , I wasnt sure exactly where this was going. Then That's Entertainment appeared on the high street , selling the second hand stuff to people as a proper record shop.

The thing is you can pick up a Robbie Williams , All Saints , Sugababes , Take That back catalogue for under a tenner second hand. The reason I'm posting this is that I've noticed Poundland are now selling second hand CDs for a pound , so I'm wondering if there is a connection.

Then yesterday I was in HMV in Stratford and noticed that HMV now have a second hand section where they sell stuff for £2 a throw. This was in addition to the Orange concession , the Apple / iPod Dock and DVD player display , T-Shirt section etc. They are so losing their identity .




The biggest irony is that despite selling CDs they don't sell anything you can play a CD on , well maybe their Blu-Ray and DVD players .....

Think Neil Innes Recycled Vinyl Blues is appropriate :

Not Dead .... You Just Have To Look

With National Record Shop Day approaching I wandered down Northumberland to check out HMV, until recently your only source of music on the high street unless theres a Tesco , or you go for the rack in the Pound Shops that are proliferating in in our relatively affluent society.  Time was when WH Smith and Boots has a sizeable music section but that's no more . HMV themselves are losing their identity with football shirts , Apple Product displays and DVDs and games taking a huge part of the display despite the fact that streaming media is negating the need for recorded films. How man do you watch more than once.

I Shrewsbury I found an HMV buried deep in a shopping centre. The shop was quite big , but the only new music was the new Madonna album and the metal section consisted of multiple copes of Black Sabbath Volume IV , Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and something by Avenged Sevenfold. Newcastle store is over three floors but the music side seems to be contracting by the second,


A surprise and welcome addition to the high street is the Thats Entertainment shops , outlets for Music Magpie. Their music is arranged by price and I picked up several limited editions (Crowded House Recurring Dream and Annie Lennox Medusa) for a couple of quid each. Second hand but excellent condition and the staff are helpful. I was suuprised to see a fair few Shirehorses albums which I thought were hard to get , well Fat Harry White is , so you you can pick up some decent stuff and they have more new stock than the Shrewsbury HMV!!

The Independents are doing well , there'll be queues outside from midnight on Friday but it's good to see there is now a choice of music on the high street.

Though of course you can always go to your local independent record shop !!