I’ve been yammering on about selling off a hefty chunk of my collection for a while now…just on the principle of freeing up space in my very finite home for the music that I do care about. Which is currently inaccessible off rack. If I want to listen to anything between TA and Z it’s currently too much of a chore to bother with! But the sad fact is that there’s so many jobs to do and the time-consuming practice of posting things for sale was always relegated to “next week.”
It didn’t help that the mandatory shipping functions in Discogs were labyrinthine to my tired, aging brain. I had actually spent a few days trying to wrap my head around the processes over several weekends the last few years, just to have a little pocket cash to buy the new things that I have stalled on buying of late. But that never happened. Now, the stakes are much higher.
We’ve committed to a lavish [for us] three week vacation next April in The Netherlands, Germany, and the UK, seeing The Nits in Amsterdam and visiting with friends I’ve met through the blog. But our budget is strained. To make this happen we are selling off lots of things we’ve collected. My wife have already begun posting some of her collections on eBay. And I have done so as well on Discogs. But I only spent a few hours last week actually posting things, but I started out with one of the proverbial “big guns” of my collection: Brian Eno’s “Working Backwards 1983-1973” boxed set I bought myself as a college graduation present in 1985.
But by 1985, I was already living the CD lifestyle, so I have barely touched the hefty box in the ensuing years. Maybe half of the 11 LPs were ever played at all, and barely [1-2 times] at that. It is a solid three figure item, so it must go. Many of my most lucrative pressings [record and CD] are in my sights to sell off. Even those Propaganda Japanese snap pack CD-3 singles are earmarked to go.
Last year, I assumed that I would be saving all of my deep core collections: the Ultravox, Simple Minds, OMD material. Lesser lights as well: Toyah, Spandau Ballet. I’d culled my Duran Duran collection in 2013, but I saved the records with Malcolm Garret sleeves to stay, and I really don’t need most of them as I have the material on CD somewhere else. This year, just 10 months before the trip I have to ask myself: where do I draw the line? At first I put the Ultravox U-Vox era material on the cull list. And maybe the Simple Minds things that I can’t stand. But today, the notion of a far more liberal culling is looking more necessary to me.
Maybe in a year my collection will be half its current size and I’ll only keep records with music not on CD elsewhere? According to the [hardly accurate] Discogs data I’ve been entering for nearly two decades, my collection says it is 6469 items. But that number is in high dispute. There’s at least 200-300 items I sold in the last decade that might not have been removed, but more importantly, I suspect that as much as 20% of my collection has never been entered!
Much of what was entered were things I ran across while researching other things and I just clicked the “add to collection” button on. Many of which from the early days [when Discogs was young with only a few million titles in the database] were only the basic artist name/title match since I didn’t have the time to enter the copy I actually had into the database. If I had done that, I might still be entering things right now! So I will have to double check everything I am selling to make sure the collection is accurate to sell anything.
While my eyes widen at some of the valuable titles I have, the bulk of it are things that are not worth much. I may have to find a way to have an online garage/car boot sale to move some of these things. And I have never been one of those anal retentive collectors. Many used records I obtained in the last 40 years have been far from mint minus. In most cases, I was just glad to have found a copy!
But the things that are more valuable will get promoted by the brand new ONLINE STORE tab on the menu here at Post-Punk Monk. As I do not have business hosting for my blog, I cannot enable payment of any kind, so I’ve done the next best thing: I will post things here on the store page and the “buy” button will link to the sale page in Discogs. Neat and tidy. But that means that sales abroad apart from America are not planned to happen. The shipping rules deemed necessary in Discogs get more complex by a cube squared factor once other countries are considered and I cannot be losing money on shipping. Join us for the music sale in progress beginning now and continuing for at least another year. I’ve got a lot of rugged terrain to negotiate.
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Post-Punk Monk 
I look forward to the possibility of clearing your shelves and filling your wallet.
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wardo68 – Now I know what I am doing for the next 40 weekends!
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“Propaganda Japanese snap pack CD-3 singles”…..ooh!
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alonewithstrangers – Yes, and in those naïve days of 1987 I actually folded them down!! So my copies will be “cheaper” than usual. Sigh.
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The snap-pack ones I have are still unsnapped but will await your listing!
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alonewithstrangers – Alas, I didn’t get “collector conscious” until the 90s! I used to glue and trim paper CD single sleeves to fit into jewel boxes for the first 5 years!!
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I folded mine down too :-(
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Mathmandan – So we’re just déclassé collector trash then? I would make a mat board frame for mine after folding them down. Then I would remove the teeth from a jewel box hub. Insert the mat board frame in the lid and the folded CD3 would fit perfectly. I would then make a laser printed back insert for the jewel box and spines so I could see the title on my racks. Since I could never imagine ever selling off any CD!
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That was very resourceful of you! I just remember thinking oh this will look neat all folded up into its little square. So…… I did. An Art of Noise similar CD too. D’oh.
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Mathmandan – Yeah that New Order “Touched By The Hand Of God” is worth much more in a pristine state! By the 90s I learned my lesson. Keep them unfolded even IF they were ever (gasp!) played!
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I don’t buy things speculatively for future resale, I buy them because I want to listen to and enjoy the music, probably why jumping to digital downloads was so easy for me to adapt to once I started doing it.
When I did my cull 20 years ago I was averaging $200 a week in sales and this was sustained for longer than I care to explictly say here. Let’s just say a long time and leave it at that.
Something that was really beneficial to that was that the whole blog/file locker thing wasn’t in its heydey just yet and people were still keen to buy that actual real item A lot of what I had was out of print or very hard to find, I remember specifically making someone really overjoyed with that Nick Cave single with the megamix b-side (think it was Loverman), received a gushing email about how fair the price was and how appreciative they were that I lowballed the quality in my description.
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Tim – I can count the times I bought something specifically for resale on the fingers of…five hands. Most of the time I don’t have that sort of cash laying around. I did buy some MSFL gold CDS at a cutout dealer in Akron during my unemployed period that were obviously worth more than the asking price back then. And when I found a copy of David Bowie’s “Liveandwell.com” at a local store in the used bin that was an obvious thing to buy for resale because I already had one.
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I want the Eno box!
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Mathmandan – It can be yours if the price is right!
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Well you certainly deserve a fair price, especially with four decades of storage!
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I did a big cull like this 20 years and regret almost none of it. And I made a lot of people very happy.
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Would sort of be interested in knowing a little in advance of what is going to be posted for sale, which I know can be a slippery slope, but still, planning and all that…
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postpostmoderndad – Well, you can always look at this and PM me if there is anything you hanker for in particular.
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Please keep me posted.
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