A impending house move is causing me to finally start cutting down on my music cassette collection, lovingly collected secondhand in the 80s when I was poor and largely stored in a mates attic for the past decade when he unexpectedly dumped 10 boxes of the ***kers round at mine meaning that the spare bedroom/snoring sin bin, which was already overcluttered now has me sleeping on a bed totally surrounded by mountains of cassettes, CDs and books.
I’m getting rid of the stuff that I have since bought on CD or don’t care about – a trial run of 10 items Hissing of Summer Lawns, Beatles 62 – 66, Second Toughest in the Infants, Paul Simons Greatest Hits, Natty Dread, Massive Attack Protection, The Bends, Best of Bowie 69/74,Whats the Story Morning Glory , Sensual World is going to test the market in a hipster central Dalston car boot this weekend.
I am worried that some of these may be rare and have market value and I will be seriously underselling myself.
I have tried to find the market price for these on Discogs and Amazon but it has proved frustrating so I am turning to you wise guys with the following questions.
Do you know what the above items should go for?
Should I do car boots or am I better off going through Discogs?
These ten are just the tip of an iceberg. I reckon I have about 500 more to go, before I start weeding out the unloved items in my vinyl collection.
I quite fancy myself as a Discogs wheeler/dealer as I potentially have some time on my hands however when I tried to register a few months back, I didn’t get very far with the process. I think i reactivated my PayPal account which is a pre-requisite and then stopped. Do any of you have any opinions or experience of selling on Discogs and are there a Idiot Guides available.
I think that is all for now. All you advice will be much appreciated.
There is a third way: there’s a shop somewhere that specialises in music cassettes. I can’t remember where it is, but every time there’s a mention of the growth of MC sales in the news, the reporters go there for a quote.
You won’t get as high a price as selling them individually, but you’d get rid of all of them at once and it would be a whole heap less hassle.
Found it: Mars Tapes in Manchester.
https://www.marstapes.co.uk/
I’ve sold about half of my CD and vinyl collection over the last 7 years or so using the local version of eBay here in Singapore. From that experience, i have two prices of advice: (i) if it’s important to get the market price for the items, then you need to be prepared to wait for the right bid unless it’s very rare, and (ii) if you’re selling one-by-one you will get more money, but you will also be spending time meeting up or posting items. If there were a shop that would have paid half of what I’ve got from selling them one-by-one, but which would have taken them all away there and then, then I would have gone that route with hindsight. Or in other words, as usual, it’s a good idea to take Fents’ advice.
If a shop pays half the perceived value you are doing very well indeed. Some may offer 10 to 20% of the real value
If you’re lucky, 30% – a third for you, a third for the shop, a third for the tax man.
I successfully sold about 150 records on ebay recently. I was slightly surprised to realise that I had no emotional attachment to them and enjoyed getting rid of them. They averaged a bit over a tenner each.
I was happy to do the research on Discogs to find the pressing -year, country, matrix/ run out codes etc. The median price for the lower value items was close to what I got for them. That was not the case for the more “valuable” items which went for less. I did get good prices for bootlegs.
You do need to do research though if you are worried about selling too cheap. You could try looking the record up on ebay, click on the Used Item and Completed Items boxes, the items with a price in green have sold. If any have gone for a lot of money then click on the original listing to see what it was that made it valuable.
I realised that things are worth what you can get for them and it’s best to leave egos to the buyers.
Good Luck.
selling boots on Discogs ????
No, on ebay. They’re not subject to the same scrutiny.
I have three boxes of CD ‘doubles’ of albums that, over the years, have been ‘accidentally’ acquired, often following late evening, red-wine-assisted bursts of enthusiasm.
Last year I dutifully listed them all in an inevitable spreadsheet, and priced them all up using Discogs. There are about 30 of them, so it didn’t take very long to do this. All are in mint or near-mint condition, and a few of them are relatively scarce – as out-of-print CDs go – it seems.
I have a Discogs account as I have bought a lot of things through the website and it helps to keep track of what I’ve bought, how much I paid and when I bought it. Ironic that in red-wine mode this facility seems to have on occasion failed me.
I put them all on sale on the site, quoting prices in line with what others had asked, and within two hours I’d received an inquiry about one of the rarer items. Almost immediately I also received a message from Discogs telling me that the account from which the inquiry had come had just been suspended, and that the inquiry I’d received had been determined by their security algorithms to have been the start of a phishing attempt, based upon other activities from that account.
Suspecting that I’d potentially opened the door to a world of hassle, I took all of the CDs back off sale, and they have remained, unsold, in the same three boxes ever since. They are all still there, listed and priced, in my Discogs account, but they are not available for discovery by other Discogs users, and therefore I will not hear any further inquiries about their purchase. I still have not decided if I will re-open the sales once more.
The lesson therefore is that if you sell anything on Discogs there is a possibility that you will attract the attentions of bad actors who will try to turn what should be a simple, easy, financial transaction into something profoundly unwanted. You may not have the same experience, and all may proceed without complication, but do take care out there.
I’ve heard similar stories on the We Buy Records podcast regards eBay.
Seller takes loads of photos, packs and posts off. Buyer raises complaint, has photos of broken/scratched record (not even the same catalogue number, etc). eBay customer services confuse apples with oranges and give buyer a full refund.
I wonder how many times a fraudster can get away with this? Presumably it’s only worth doing on expensive items.
Presumably, the seller can then give the buyer negative feedback?
I’ve never had any negative feedback myself, but I have had to call in their customer services to resolve disputes a couple of times. Most recently when I bought a second-hand computer monitor which was listed as one model but a different (older) model was delivered. Despite being listed as one model (which has HDMI and DP inputs), the listing contains photos of an older model (which has HMDI and VGA inputs). I didn’t actually look at the photos before buying, which was daft of me, and which the seller pointed out “it was clear from the photos”. I got my 25 quid back promptly, once I called in help…
Sellers haven’t been allowed to leave negative feedback for buyers for many years now.
I sold a “modded” Apple TV on eBay once and sent it to the buyer in the US. He said he couldn’t watch (ice) hockey on it and wanted his money back. I had no option but to comply and he then sent it back declaring its value and I had to pay customs fees on it!
Aargh!
It’s a very odd site. Totally unintuitive and for some reason it prices everything in Euro.
Discogs? It is in Canadian dollars for me. Maybe it thinks you are in the Netherlands or something. That happened to me for a while.
I have only bought things there on a handful of occasions but everything went really well. I certainly think it is preferable to eBay for reasons given here, however the shipping costs to here are often prohibitive.
That’ll teach you to use that dodgy VPN you picked up in a coffee shop.
I just checked, and I’ve bought 645 things from Discogs, only ever had about three no-shows, and got refunds for all of them. On the whole I find it by far the best place to pick up second-hand CDs.
I used to patrol the small-ads in Record collector each month and buy used LPs from there, to the extent that I knew Nick Salomon’s home address off by heart because of the number of times we’d traded records. But when my vinyl consumption waned and I started buying used CDs, Discogs quickly became my home-from-home when looking for titles that I might have to wait six months or more to spot for sale in the micro-fonted pages of the RC small-ads.
Try selling on the Hoffman forum. Start high and reduce. Not sure if there is much of a market for cassettes but if they have rare mixes or something then you may do ok. Beatles red album will be fairly common I suspect
Several years ago I discovered, too late, that the two cats (of the nine we had) who used the music room for home base had decided to ignore the scratching post installed, and use the L-Z album shelf instead.
Oh well, you can’t take it with you…..