Deciding which records/cd’s to cull when you have run out of space is a tremendously difficult thing to do. It takes careful consideration as in my experience once you have decided to take something off your shelf and consign it to storage in the attic/garage or ,heaven forbid, the skip chances are you will want to listen to it.
At the weekend I was looking for something I couldn’t find and started looking through a couple of boxes of stuff I was about to file in the garage – stuff that had been in boxes for maybe the last year. Whilst searching I came across ‘The indestructible beat of Soweto’. I have no idea why I consigned this cd to a future life of purgatory. It is brilliant. It has been redeemed and now sits proudly back on my shelf.
So fellow AW’ers – have you regretted throwing something out in haste?
Dont throw the baby out with the bathwater.
by 74 Comments
I’ve sold or donated loads of records and CDs over the years, especially recently since I’ve been drowning in stuff. So far I’ve not regretted a thing. I try to look at it as ‘honing’ the collection. Getting rid of music to make room for better music is a no-brainer. An easy come, easy go outlook helps too.
I couldn’t take my records with me when I left England for NZ 19 years ago so I got rid of them. Even though they are available on Spotify etc I do wish I still had them. But it’s only a minor twinge of regret – it was the right thing to do.
Just moving house at the moment, and I reckon about a third of the CDs are going to have to go into the attic. Which isn’t particularly inaccessible, but I do suspect that anything that goes in probably won’t come out again. Just piling up the ones that are currently earmarked for a new life in the roof, and will have a quick (ha!) pass over them before they go up to make sure I’ve not made a huge mistake anywhere.
The only album I can remember giving up/away was a Marillion b-sides compilation that I swapped with my brother for a copy of the first Betty Boo album. Have never regretted that.
Just remembered another CD I gave away. Someone on here got a copy of a CSN&Y live covermount from Uncut after I mentioned that I was never going to feel the need to listen to it!
That was me! I still have it and won’t be culling that one.
I feel honoured to be a recipient of one of the only two CDs you’ve ever parted with 😃
P.S. You’re almost certainly right about the ones going into the attic. Save the bother and space – get em down the chazza. You won’t miss them, I promise.
I suspect you’re right, but the chance of binning something either in error or that I later want is too daunting 🙂
I may (be told to) implement some kind of “If it’s still up there in X months time, then it goes out” rule.
120 sounds like a reasonable value for X doesn’t it?
I had half an idea that it was you, but wasn’t 100%. It’s a bit of spurious honour and no mistake, but I’m glad it’s found a good home 🙂
Not the one of out takes and half finished tracks from the first album? It’s brilliant!
Dunno, I didn’t listen to it 🙂
I remember it did have “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” on it, so perhaps not.
I avoid discarding anything unless I replace it on CD, and have thousands of CDs, including plenty by acts I don’t particularly see the appeal of: given you can get them for £1 a go in many charity shops, it seems a bargain. Mostly the shops have dross, but you can his paydirt, and vigilance pays off. That said, it’s now horribly disorganised and I mostly use ITunes to listen to music when i am at home or in the car.
Back in the good old days at the dawn of the CD, I decided that I would sell lots of albums, but keep lots of 12″ singles. The logic behind my decision was that I could [and most likely would] repurchase the albums on CD, but the singles would be irreplaceable – What actually happened of course, is that 5 years ago I began repurchasing lots of albums on vinyl and giving away lots of 12″ singles that I have no intention of ever listening to again and that no-one wanted to buy.
But here’s the really funny part, 5 years later, most of the 12″ singles that I gave away would now fetch a decent amount on ebay! Ah, you’ve got to laugh.
I used to have a couple of thousand vinyl records, including lots of quite collectable Beatles related records, but I was living in one room, which was full of all sorts of other things so I was rapidly running out of space, and I bought a CD player, so I got rid of around 95% of my vinyl to fund an instant CD collection. This was around 1991, well before eBay, so I was selling them to shops a batch at a time. It’s safe to say I only got a fraction of their value then and I wouldn’t want to know what they’d be worth today, but I wouldn’t be able to afford to buy them all back.
I now live in a 5 bedroom house, yet I have still run out of space. I made a decision a few years ago, after some complaining from the wife, that I would have a one in one out rule for my CDs, so I wouldn’t have any more than would fit on to the two shelving units. It went okay for a while, as I wasn’t buying many, although it was starting to get harder to choose what to sell. In fact, I have since bought a few back! But I then I started buying CDs at a very fast rate from the beginning of 2016, when I started exploring musical avenues I hadn’t given much attention to, like hip hop, so I had to relax that rule, as I have filled shelves and shelves with new CDs (fortunately, quite inexpensively, as they were mainly 20-30 years old and available for pennies). So now the decision is no longer what to sell, but what to relegate to the cupboard.
Still got far too much vinly and plan to charidee a sizable chunk of it in the not too distant future.
The one CD in/one CD out model I like, and as the Record Fair is coming to town on Saturday (hurrah!), a shoe-in for 4 or 5 CDs, I may select 4 or 5 brave soldiers to go in the opposite direction.
They’d have wanted it that way.
Once streaming really kicked in thousands of CD’s went downstairs into the dungeon, a hundred or so “important” ones kept in the music room. A year or so ago the thousands went off to a local French Charity – no idea what they thought of Graham Parker Live At Marble Arch or a bootleg of The Skids Live At The Alhambra Dunfermline. A week ago I looked in the music room and said “Right, off you go too”.
The piece pf paper came through today – I am officially free!!
First World problems/I have an ongoing cull in operation/Since I started the cull I have bought three times tha amount that I`ve culled/In the past I have had several culls/All purely for the sake of lack of space/Regrets?/None.
About 12 years ago I bought a number of CD wallets and threw away the horrible outer plastic cases. They now take up about 1/10 of the room they used to. All.have been ripped to a hard drive and I only keep them as back ups in case of emergency. They are stored under the stairs. Vinyl is another matter.
The CD wallet route is the one I took.
It has freed up loads of space and i can now rifle through them like a miniature set of LPs!
I’ve recently started logging my collection on Discogs. It’s very much a long-term, ongoing project, but by the end of it I hope to have every item on there so that I can see how much the entire collection is worth. When I die it’s an easy way for my wife and kids to sell my collection at its best value, plus it might be useful for insurance purpose should the worst happen, plus it’s made me look at the collection in a different light. Suddenly it’s no longer my indulgence — it’s actually a bit of an investment.
What’s fascinating is a.) seeing how quickly it adds up. Up until last night I’d been doing it in dribs and drabs, only a fraction of my collection itemised, and I’m already up to about £4,000 worth. In fact, it was seeing that figure which made me decide to take the project more seriously and do the whole lot, and b.) how the the things I thought would be worth a mint are not, and vice versa. Last night I was amazed to find that a Trojan Reggae for Kids box set is fetching up to £40.
Mine is worth between $10K and $30K according to discogs (vinyl only)
Ah, I’ve done similar. A couple of years ago my wife queried whether everything I had – CDs/DVDs/Books/Magazines/Football Programmes/Artwork/Trading Cards/Comics/All Sorts Of Rubbish – would be covered under the insurance. I spoke with Aviva, they assured me it was all now covered with a slight increase to the premium and that was that. Until a week later when I got a call saying they had reviewed their calls, they had given me the wrong advice and they don’t offer insurance to cover my collections, so I had 7 days to find alternative cover before going off risk! Fortunately, I called Hiscox and they covered everything on a like for like basis for the same premium that Aviva had increased me to.
When I asked Hiscox what proof they would need of what I have they just said they’d ask for that in the event of a claim. Having worked in insurance for the past 10 years I didn’t trust them, so I spent several months compiling lists of everything of value I have, every CD, Blu Ray, Comic, Football Programme, etc. And then I took photographs of everything and stored it in the cloud. A year later, at renewal time, the wording on the policy particulars just didn’t look right, and sure enough I still wasn’t covered properly, so I set about pricing everything up, as best I could. I was also doing this for my wife, like yourself, as she wouldn’t have a clue which football programmes are worth 50p and which are worth £100, which CDs are worth £100 and which could be used as coasters, etc.
After much to-ing and fro-ing we finally got it all covered and they are pleased that I’ve got everything listed and photographed, as very few people do this. I was surprised how quickly things add up, as even allowing for the CDs that would only cost £3.99 to replace the CDs alone soon cleared £20k. The overall cost of all my collections made my wife sit up and decide they’re now ‘ours’ and not ‘mine’! We’ve even had to specify them in the wills we’ve just drawn up. At least you can see where most of my money has gone over the past 35 years.
Ironically, 4 hours after I finished the phone call to Hiscox one Monday with the words “we’ll only lose all the collections if there is a big fire and we’re not having one of those” I came home from picking the kids up from school to see my wife running down the road, clutching the guinea pigs she’d rescued, screaming the kitchen was on fire and the house was full of smoke! The dishwasher had gone up and you couldn’t see through the windows for the smoke. Fortunately, the local fire station was manned for a change and they were there really quickly and soon cleared the smoke out. The dishwasher had burned itself out without taking hold of everything else, which is uncommon, and despite the kitchen being full of thick black smoke, all my collections were unharmed. Nevertheless, I had to make a phone call back to Hiscox, 4 hours after the previous one, saying “about that fire…”
The photos are a good idea and keeping records/lists of your collections. I was burgled in 1991, bastard took all my CDs, CD player, amp, TV, other electronics. The thick twat left my Linn Axis turntable. The biggest robber was the insurance loss-adjuster, I’ll cut this short, I threatened this greasy slick of a human with the Insurance Ombudsman….that did the trick. Paid out in full.
I’m glad I’ve read your post @Paul_Wad because I’ve just changed from Aviva to the AA for home insurance and they have said my LP/CD collection is covered for £XXXXXX but I’ve yet to check the small print. Your post had reminded me I should do so.
I’ve also started a Discogs list. I’ve listed 300 items* so far, it’s bloody time consuming, lowest value £3,700 – highest £7,800**. Only another 7,000 to go. I started the Discogs list for the sake of my wife who would have binned the lot, if I don’t point out the value, when I join Jimi, Tom, Bob, George & John in the astral plane.
*I have an almost up to date list of my collection specifically for insurance purposes.
**Your collection is only worth what people are prepared to pay for it.
I remember back in the late 80’s when I was renewing my insurance, I spoke to one company on the phone who said that they wouldn’t consider all my CDs a collection, a collection would just be a single artists so as long as I didn’t have more then 10 CDs by a single artist, I was covered… I glanced at the Elvis Costello section on my shelves and called another insurer!
As an Elvis Costello fan, it’s possible to have 10 different UK releases of the same CD, isn’t it?
Due to moving house a ridiculous amount of times over recent years, I have resorted to storing most of my CDs in those file folders that look like photo albums. It’s a pretty good solution; you can store up to 80 discs in one folder (mine hold fewer, as I opted to keep the inserts as well – you can just about fit the insert and the disc itself into each pocket of the sleeve) and you can label the file folders alphabetically or by genre etc. They save a lot of space on the shelves. I have kept those CDs which have particularly interesting or unique casing, and of course a growing collection of boxsets, but I find the files are a good solution if storage is becoming a problem.
On the subject of vinyl, the multiple recent moves prompted me to discard some of my albums to charidee, as at the time I didn’t have anything to play them on and couldn’t foresee ever doing so. And then at Christmas…Santa arrived with a turntable! Thankfully I hadn’t given too many records away, so I’m able to enjoy my past again. There’s such a Proustian rush in playing an album – I can remember where and when I bought almost every one of ’em.
Dosen’t having your CDs in a wallet cause a problem, one I considered when I created more shelf space? The problem? What happens if you store your collection A-Z and the next CD you buy has to go say half way into an already full wallet. Yes you can leave empty pockets but then you start to defeat the object of the exercise.
As someone who has already posted, I have taken all my CDs in jewel cases out of them and placed them in plastic wallets along with the inserts. I don’t know about fitting ten CDs in place of one jewel case, I found that four was more like it. But now, as I have stated above there is no room at the Inn. I may become wealthy because I will have to cut back drastically but then I can concentrate on RARITIES!
Yeah but isn’t it academic? My Nils Lofgren box set that cost £95 is selling for £ 360 on Amazon but you have to find someone to offer that amount`.
That’s what I always say. You don’t know how much something is worth till you’ve put it on eBay and sold it.
I expect that if it came to some kind of crunch, getting the quoted prices for records in a collection would be difficult if not impossible.
Certainly if you needed to offload a large collection quickly in an emergency.
Indeed. I can’t begin to imagine the utter ballache of selling 1000s of items individually on Discogs or fleabay, what with all the photographing, pricing, listing, packaging, weighing, post office trips etc., then you need to take into account various fees, idiot customers and goodness knows what else, magnified from our usual experience of selling a few bits and bobs occasionally.
I’m pretty sure that in many cases, loved ones left large collections either sell them to a dealer at a fraction of their (perceived) value, or donate or even dump them, to avoid this exhausting proposition. Especially at a time of bereavement.
Sorry to be so cheerful!
As the 50s/60s teenagers/record collectors are now coming towards the end of their lives it is said that charity shops could soon be in for some pretty decent donations from spouses who don’t realise the value of their partners’ collections. Or, if you are in the business of ripping off little old ladies, now’s the time to be advertising you buy old record collections and will come to value/collect. My wife reckons that when I snuff it she’s having a big bonfire, but my kids (12 & 8) have already put their claims in for various items.
I think that if you want to cash in on your “investment” the time to do it is now. The people who pay silly money for vinyl are approaching retirement and won’t have the same disposable income. Apparently the going rate for Elvis rarities is plummeting.
First World problems….
I suspect that if my flat was burgled, the last things likely to be taken are my CDs and vinyl. Too bulky for their perceived resale value. They won’t find any cash, jewellery etc. at my gaff. What might get stolen are my laptops, camera equipment, power tools, bottles of wine & spirits and possibly my TV if they don’t have to carry it very far.
Mostly burglars are not very sophisticated people. They want items with a decent resale value that can fit in a bag, aren’t too heavy and can be converted to cash or drugs quickly.
Fire, of course, is a different story. All my music is digitised with 4 copies of everything, not all kept in the same place.
1991 – CDs were very resealable. None of my vinyl was taken, Sign ‘O’ The Times.
Do you keep all your hard drives in different places at home, or do you leave one elsewhere? I’ve stupidly got mine all within a few feet of each other, as I back them up every few weeks and I’m too lazy to go round the house hunting for them. I must change that! I’ve toyed with the idea of leaving one at my sister’s house, but it would be a faff having to keep getting it back to update it.
With my backup software, Syncbak, the gets an option to back up to a remote drive – day on your sister’s pc for example. Not tried it though. After I had some stuff stolen last year I’ve been much more fussy about backups but there still a load of data I haven’t got around to doing yet.
Two USB drives in the hall, just by the front door and the other two in the sitting room. This is a problem, in the event of a fire. The drives in the hall are kept at floor level with no flammable material very near.
I can’t afford to pay for cloud storage because of the sheer amount of material, getting on for 2TB. Keeping a drive or two at a relative’s isn’t really practical because of a:) how often things are added/edited/removed and b:) the utter lack of technical knowledge of all of my relatives. I like to synch all four drives whenever anything is added.
My sister’s broadband only gets used when her kids and their offspring are there. My brother’s setup is not secure enough. He’s forever getting infected with viruses that I am expected to get rid of for him.
I’m the same but I just finally got round to doing something about it. I’ve now got a second NAS drive which (when I get back from my holiday) will allow me to put the old one (with just a single drive inside) in the garage which is at the bottom of the garden. If all goes to plan, my main RAID drives will get backed up to an encrypted drive in the garage at least once a day. I know I won’t be able to do it wirelessly so I’m hoping a couple of powerline adaptors will do the trick but I haven’t actually tried anything yet. I had considered just keeping a USB drive in my desk at work and backing up once a month but I know that that’ll end up being no better than once every two months and probably a lot worse than that – much better to have a system that, once set up just works!
I’m in a 1-bed flat in a block so nowhere outside of the flat to put my 2 Raspberry Pi NASs. I may move one from the hall to the far corner of the bedroom.
Although I wonder if I could put one of them outside in my car..
I have, in the past, considered a backup NAS reciprocal arrangement – I have a friend or relative’s NAS and they have mine – they effectively become a cheap personal cloud. These days, when many (most? all?) ISP accounts have unlimited data, it’s really only the cost of the electricity to power it and it would only need to be on for a few hours a day and on standby the rest of the time.
Discogs tells you how much the item has previously sold for, and bases prices on that. It’s slightly different to Amazon where a seller with no stock will offer something at an extortionately high price in order that that they don’t incur the cost of relisting it at a later stage.
e.g. this Lee Perry CD on Amazon. I got quite excited to see it at £142
Only to go to Discogs and find that the highest it’s ever commanded is actually £12.99
https://www.discogs.com/Lee-Scratch-Perry-Back-On-The-Controls/release/5592774
Great album, by the way. Best thing he’s done in the last ten years.
Culling CDs / DVDs is always hard at the time, but once said items are consigned to landfill or off to Music Magpie (same thing?) I’ve never regretted parting with any of them. Books now, that’s another matter entirely….. Hence, shelves groaning, floorboards sagging.
Dunno – never knowingly thrown anything away (I’m sure someone has, and I’m still looking for the Otis Redding CD).
The solution to “deciding which records/cd’s to cull when you have run out of space” in my world is “get more storage space”.
I am in the process of sourcing and locating (somewhere in the house) new shelving.
I have to obtain wifely approval, but shouldn’t be an issue – who needs ornaments and framed pictures anyway? And why do they have to be in a perfectly serviceable CD cabinet?
(I realise the “buy more storage option” is space dependent, and the day of culling may one day arise, but until then …)
My wife is definitely the handbrake on many of my additional storage plans. I shudder to think of what the house would look like if I were on my own, as parts of it already resemble a library.
For me it is definitely a case of if I can’t find something from my collection I really need to hear it/find it otherwise it starts nagging away at me.
A case in point is a Victoria Williams CD which I didn’t care for much when it was on my shelves but now that it has disappeared it has taken on mythical status.
This is me. I can feel a CD’s absence and it irks me.
Agreed @Tiggerlion – I have to confess to some dishonesty. This months MOJO came with an intriguing CD of artists inspired by Pink Floyd. My wife decided to chuck it in the bin without consulting me. I was mortified by what was really a pretty trivial and innocent act – her reckoning was I rarely listened to these covermount cd’s. Whilst partially correct, this missing cd took on a status of being the most brilliant thing never listened to I our house.
As a subscriber I called MOJO and advise them my mag had arrived without a CD.
They promptly sent me a new mag complete with CD. It is actually very good.
Wow! I need that magazine.
My copy of that CD is currently in the car CD player. It is indeed one of MOJO’s better ones.
When’s the divorce? 😉
I was thinking the very same. My wife would never even consider doing that sort of thing and I wouldn’t throw any of her stuff out either.
If that happened to me Steve, it`s pack yer feckin` bags. Feck knows where I`d go! Hur hur hur.
I just giggle when I think about the conundrum I will present my kids. Bote relatively muso, they won’t throw away blind and will feel duty bound, especially the boy, to listening first.
Lucky devil, say I.
Yeah, I bet he’s looking forward to that George Formby box set.
He will only have time to listen to it after he has cleaned the windows.
Nah, he’s not so good. Retro’s given him Aunty Maggie’s Homemade Remedy.
Turned out nice again.
Haven’t moved for some time but odds on moving in the not too distant. I do recall offloading some quite valuable Vinyl when we moved to a smaller flat many years ago to a guy who lived upstairs who was well into into the black plastic- on the basis that I had them on CD – I gave away I’d say what’d fetch 500 quid now. Fuck.
In terms of Vinyl it’s the sheer weight of the bloody stuff and on that score i’m trying to exercise crop-rotation on a rolling basis and just keep what I want and send less essential stuff out into the wild via record dealers or Discogs. With CD I’ve got a lot of quite obscure stuff which is still reasonably valuable, so I’ll be keeping that stuff and sending the bog standard CDs to chazzers and the less essential vinyl to a record shop if I need to save storage space.
I still buy CDs as much as I’ve always done and I imagine I’m the kind of person who’s buying all your second-hand CDs from Music Magpie or Amazon.
Moi aussi. It’s all Music Magpie these days. Whatever happened to CDNow!?
CDThen
Music Magpie on Amazon seems to provide better condition cheapy second hand than Music Magpie the site.
Just an observation
And on eBay.
Could be a feedback thing.
Aye and if there is a problem they take notice.
I’m not so much of a collector as a hoarder, when it comes to music. Even stuff that I find I don’t like doesn’t get discarded.
You’re mad 😃
So?
Well nothing, really. It’s fine.
That’s what I thort.
You seem to have a very healthy attitude to collecting.
There is no healthy attitude to hoarding but WTF.
I’m with you Mike – just can’t bear dumping music (even “music of a questionable quality”).
Say hello to the James Galway, Jimmy Shand and Hammond Organ records in my collection
Can’t beat a budget Hammond record.
The others would make nice fruit bowls!
Nah…I’ve moved 5 times in 10 years, having my music in a thing the size of a tin of sardines is the go. It’s backed up, but if it all goes bung there’s Spotify etc. The books now, that’s another matter…I’m nervously awaiting the opening of a container next month to see if they’ve survived the last 4 years, plus the arrival of 4 large boxes from Oz. I’m spending rather a lot of money to have shelves built in the new flat, going to look pretty silly if there are no books to put on them. Still, the insurance will buy quite a lot of new ones – who needs tables and chairs? 😉
Having done the “tin of sardines and there is always Spotify” thing with music I have started to do the same with books. Apart from looking good and possibly making people think I am some sort of intellectual what is the point of shelves & shelves of books? If I ever need to read Steppenwolf again (unlikely) one press of a button and there it is. I’ll keep my Biff collection and perhaps a hundred or so out-of-print loved-ones but there’s going to be a nearby Emmaus overflowing with English literature very soon. Unclutter, unclutter!
Given the majority of train-spotting comments above I strongly suspect I am preaching the wrong sermon.
Yes, this…but, but…books I want to read but not keep go on the Kindle, books I want to keep but not necessarily read go on the shelf. I don’t care if I never read them, I know they are there, and I love them as objects. Books do furnish a room, as a wordy writer I can’t abide once said.