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What’s the best way to sell your CD collection?

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I’m halfway through Barcode scanning several hundred CD’s on the Music Magpie app. My goal is only to send items over a small value (more than 10p).

After the twentieth valuation of 1p I’m thinking there ought to be a market where I can bulk sell these for slightly more?

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Comments

  1. Is there in fact such a place? Or should I just accept that there isn’t and chazza the valueless ones? Some of them are valued at £1.50 or more, if I remove them from the MM trolley the postage will be more than the total…

  2. Last time I had a clear out my local second hand shop was very obliging in sorting through what they could sell and returning (quite a hefty box load) of the remainder. Then I MM’d what was left and donated the rest. It was a lengthy process, time consuming and not particularly profitable, so good luck with that.

  3. The World of Books does CDs too. As a guide they offered me £1.70 for a digipack Hard Days Night. Only 50p for a limited edition Richard Thompson “Electric” though.

  4. There’s always eBay, but I must admit to generally steering clear as it’s such a palaver. Discogs too, but ditto the palaver. Music Magpie is convenient, but some of the prices they offer are laughable.

    • World of Books is convenient in that they pay the postage so you just scan the bins and stick in a box then print the postage label they send you. But I half filled a box and my total was up to about £4.20 and I decided that I couldn’t be arsed so at some point they’ll go to the Chazza. My one of choice is Cancer Research as they take anything with a smile.

      • I did two lots to World of Books for just over a £10 return. They pay better than MM but the hassle isn’t worth it.

        I was offered £6 for the full CD collection of Cheap Trick albums (insert snarky comments here) so I left.

  5. A couple of years ago I had about 300 to get rid of, none of them big sellers. I gave up with Music Magpie as they were typically offering about 15p.
    I gave half of them to Oxfam, which I regretted as you would have thought I had taken a dump in their shop by their reaction. No idea what happened to them. I took the other half to be MIND who were really pleased and would have taken more. A couple of months later I got an email from them saying they had raised £300. I wish I had given them the lot.

    • I fear there’s a twisted terminological echo as regards what happened to them at Oxfam – they took them to the dump.

      I tried having a book clearout (always painful, never satisfying) via Oxfam a few years back and was seriously pissed off by the hoity toity attitude of their ghastly Hyacinth shop staff as regards the collectability of the titles I was trying to donate.

      Mind you, it was the Oxfam shop in Bath, after all, so perhaps I should have expected their disdain due to the lack of mint condition, dust-jacketed first editions in my offering.

      • There’s something about people who work at Oxfam shops. Where i was living at the time had two shops, one just for books and one for everything else and the people in both were always totally snotty. They acted like they were doing you a massive favour whether you were buying or donating. I would never give anything to them again.

        I also knew someone who managed one of their shops for a while and it came as no surprise to find out that the people working there had first dibs on everything. Probably the same in all of them to be fair.

        • When I had a clear out before moving in 2024 the Chelmsford branch was very accommodating. They send a bloke around in a car who took 3 trips to clear out what they wanted and I didn’t.

          • Well it’s nice to know they aren’t all like that. When I took in the CDs they couldn’t even be bothered to come round from behind the counter. They just pointed and said ‘put them there’ before going back to talking to the other person behind the counter.

  6. It is a classic case of sunk costs: because we paid £7.99 for a CD a decade ago we feel that MM or WOB should be paying us more than 15p for it now. I am gradually pruning the CD shelves and take them to Oxfam five a time, together with a few books. Always happy to see them and a few weeks later I see them out for purchase. The odd CD that I feel I could sell for 4.99 or so I do on ebay. by far the best thing to ebay is iphones – I’ve sold the family’s last 4 or so when they upgrade and they always go for roughly double what cex would give you. Funny that!

  8. Mass produced goods are rarely of value in second-hand markets. It’s about how desirable an object is and in what condition it is in. Material goods are only worth what someone is willing to pay for them. The hassle involved in selling these things is proportionally far greater than any money that’s likely to be accrued this is why I give ‘stuff’ away. Trying to garner an acceptable price is more bother than it’s worth.
    Good luck.

  9. No point in general selling to a company that wants to sell them on for a profit. Sell directly either through eBay, Discogs or Facebook Marketplace. The latter might be best, no fees. Maybe sell in bulk, 50 for 10 quid or something List one’s worth more than a fiver separately

  10. Interesting thread as I am slowly starting to buy DVDs again, used from MM and WoB, largely because a lot of stuff isn’t on streaming. We’ve discussed getting rid of Netflix, although I doubt we will but it’s currently the only video streaming we have. Once my daughter is back from uni, in a couple of weeks, we plan on dumping Spotify although the kids may still use it.

  11. Okay, I hear you, thanks for the various advices. I think I’m going to filter out the best priced ones on ebay and chazza the rest.

    I guess discogs is the place for a decent price guide?

    • When I considered MM for selling stuff before, it was very obvious when something was worth anything as they valued it as £8.50 rather than £0.10. Those items were sold separately for considerably more than MM wanted to offer.

    • You can scan barcodes into ebay and then click the Completed Items box. The prices in green are sold. That’s an indication of what people are willing to pay. It’s also useful for seeing how often it sells.

  12. I would never sell to M.M. they’re robbing bastards.

    I take unwanted CDs to my nearest indie shop and Dave the owner will pay 50% of what he sells them for which is around £3, I get £1.50.

    CDs I think he wouldn’t want i give to the local ‘Mind’ charity shop.

    @MC-Esher when I decided to go the eBay route a while ago I sold CDs by grouping them by genre. The prog groups (around a dozen in each group) all sold for a decent price and rapidly. You could also group them by artist/band I’ve been successful doing that. Valuable CDs sell them individually either by set price or auction. Good luck.

  14. Don’t sell them, you might regret it someday. I was thinking of selling all mine a few years ago, but stored them up in the attic instead. I’m glad I did, as earlier this year I decided I’d had enough of streaming music, and wanted to start listening to my cds again.

    I bought a decent cd system with some powerful speakers, and am loving the experience of playing physical music again. I now listen to my cds from start to finish with no skipping at all. When I was streaming music my attention span was awful, and I was skipping all the time. It’s like rediscovering music again, as I haven’t played a lot of these cds for years.

    I’ve had some great bargains from Charity Shops(thanks for everyone who donated), and have bought a lot of new ones this year. The Original Album Series is wonderful. Five albums by your favourite artist for just over a tenner. I also love the little booklets that come with cds, with notes on who wrote the songs, who produced it, etc, and some of my cds have some wonderful booklets, the boxset ones have booklets 100 pages long. I think it’s all part of the experience of listening to music, like reading the liner notes on an LP on the bus home from town many years ago.

    So hang on to them awhile I say, or certainly don’t sell them for peanuts. Remember how much you wanted that cd at the time, and all the effort and money that went into buying it. Cds are on their way back, you know.

    • I’m exactly the same.

      I know that the much of my CD collection would probably be worth only pennies second-hand (I learnt from selling some DVD box sets to CEX – another potential buyer that pays literally a few pence for an item, if they take them at all – that most second-hand media items are practically worthless in this age of streaming).

      I also know that my collection means a lot to me. Buying music is my only extravagance, and I have zero interest in streaming – without doing a lot of research to check, I expect that the sound quality can’t compare with my (not stupidly expensive, but nice-quality) separates-based set-up. I also like knowing that at least a recognisable percentage of my money is going to end up with the artist, rather than the ridiculously tiny sums that most earn from the streamers. Finally, I know that music I enjoy won’t disappear at the click of a switch at Streamer HQ or because of a rights issue or other dispute.

      So, barring a disaster, I can’t see a reason to sell any of my CDs.

      Books, on the other hand? Yes. I’ve accepted that I have too many books that I’m never going to get round to reading again that are now taking up far too much space. So every few months I have a purge and send a box or two to We Buy Books. Most go for 20p (if WBB will take them), but occasionally a book will be worth £5-10. A box-full generally brings in enough to pay for a CD. And on it goes…

      • I purged my modest CD collection a few years ago but ended up buying many of the albums back again on the secondhand market. I do stream music a lot, but anything I like generally ends up being purchased on CD. I had considered slimming down on storage space by ditching plastic jewel boxes, but in the end chose not to. My CD collection means a lot to me too although I realise it would be worthless to anyone else or on the open market. I’m not precious about buying secondhand; the likes of Discogs being a veritable treasure trove of rarities.

    • Same here.

      I am predominantly digital these days with all music on a NAS drive and played via Roon. The majority is ripped from CDs or BluRay, with some of the more recent stuff being downloads.

      That said, I have no intention of getting rid of the CDs. I may never ever use them again and I have stripped them all out of the cases and put in plastic sleeves, but they are all safely stored away just in case.

      Having spent most of my working career with disk drive companies, I would never 100% trust them. Even though I have a backup up of my music library on other drives, I still want the original CDs just to be sure.

    • This is EXACTLY how I feel.

      I can open a box of CDs that has been buried for some time, take out a couple of CDs I haven’t seen since the last century, and instantly rediscover the joys of actually having an artefact that contains both the music and (usually) written material to describe what I’m hearing. Who knew?

      PS I have three boxes full of those little Original Album Classics/Original Album Series sets – they are terrific. There are a number of those featuring European artists who never get heard in the UK – I’m trawling through Discogs from time to time looking for one or two of those, as they have become very hard to find.

    • Congratulations on reading CD liner notes. At my advanced age that is a challenge. Most of my CDs are stored in boxes without the jewel case, kept the paper parts. They are ripped to a hard disc and mostly streamed. That’s just getting your “1s” and “0s” in a different way

    • This … some call it hoarding, others ask “how can you listen to them all”
      other questions: “do you really need multiple copies” and “where are you going to put them all”
      (these statements all came from the same source).
      I did have a purge, and bunged them in the loft. I then had an un-purge and brought them all back down when I got new shelves.
      No, I can’t listen to them all … but there might come a moment when my brain focuses one one artist, album, or song, and I know it’s in easy alphabetical reach.
      Plus .. rows of neatly stacked shelves just look appealing (certainly better than a Windows Explorer file list)

  16. “Grandad died last week. Old bastard left the house stuffed full of them CD things. Used to see him standing in front of all those shelves muttering something about ‘How do I file Bob Marley and The Wailers, under B or W?’ Took me ages to get them all in the skip.

  17. Mine are piled up on the floor in neat little rows or in ominous looking black boxes. Herself’s DVDs occupy all available shelving in the room along with books. I’ve promised myself that I am going to desist from purchasing any more but inconsiderate buggers keep releasing discs I want. However I have in recent weeks kept it down to a handful of second hand from The Land of Grey and Pink and the new one from Phoebe Bridgers.

    • There may be increased interest in buying CDs so naturally the record companies are increasing the prices considerably. New Stones CD is $34.75 on Amazon Canada, about 20 quid once taxes are added. I remember new CDs costing $13.99 not too long ago

    • The problem with %’s is that the lower the starting point, the higher any % growth is likely to be, and the Guardian includes absolutely no additional context. A quick rummage online puts a lot of the growth down to K-Pop and in particular BTS.

      The actual number of CDs sold was around 16m – it was 279m in the early 2000’s. Vinyl sold 47m units, so CDs will need 200% growth to actually match vinyl. In the meantime streaming generates 84% of the total recorded music revenue.

      • The critical ‘additional context’ is in the stated fact that the standard re-issue vinyl version of Oasis’ ‘Definitely Maybe’ goes for between £20 to £30, while the standard CD edition can be had for under a fiver. The pendulum will inevitably swing as a result.

        • I’m still of the opinion that the Vinyl revival is a fad. A long-lasting fad, mind you.
          This current CD revival is probably also a fad, though potentially one with more legs than the Vinyl one due to needing far less monetary outlay in the long term.
          Once you have something to play your CDs on, you’re set up for a good few years. Vinyl hardware ownership requires additional purchasing at regular intervals and the discs themselves are much more subject to wear and tear than CDs, no matter how carefully you handle them.

          It should not be assumed that digitised/streaming music or the hardware to play it is going to be around forever either.

          Neither vinyl or CDs are likely to die out completely in my lifetime, however long that remains to be, or for many a year after I’m gone

          Just remembered that there’s a digital album from Jazz In Britain that’s waiting for me to download it. Must dash.

          • That sounds like an argument used for CDs in the mid 80s. Then that was the only way to play digital files, now they are unnecessary. I think they will live on for a while, but vinyl will too, a certain section of the public like having analogue sound and big covers to look at when the music is playing. And as I wrote previously if CDs really come back in numbers the record companies will note that and increase the prices.

          • “Pure, perfect sound, forever”… Except… disc rot (I have plenty of bronzed CDs which won’t play any more), the playing side is subject to scratches, the lasers in CD players go dim over time, the lasers move on mechanised/motorised “sledges” which age/gum up/wear out over time, and they’re virtually impossible to fix.

            I have 70-year-old Frank Sinatra LPs which still play perfectly (and sound great) and 25-year-old CDs which will hardly play at all (and sound shite). You can still play records with a clockwork spring, a pine needle and a paper cone!

            I bet you can still play vinyl in another 70 years, I’m not convinced about CDs. What other late-70s/early-80s tech are we still using now? Are you posting to the AW on a ZX81? I doubt it.

            • I can’t consider either to be a fad as both formats have never ceased to be available despite changes in playback technology. There will always be a small cohort of collectors for both and the music industry will be more than happy to rinse them as it always has been.
              Over the years I’ve only had one CD go bad on me, a copy of The Dreaming by Kate Bush, I must be lucky at least to date. I’ve lost count of the numbers of players though. I’d happily get back into vinyl if I had the living space but a small council flat is hardly conducive especially as it’s already heaving at the seams with “stuff”.

            • I have a fair few CDs that, last time I played them, had become bronzed. All of them still played, although that was a few years back.
              I stopped buying CDs from shops or online a few years back and recently don’t feel so inclined to buy CDs at gig merch tables. I have an annual subscription with Jazz In Britain for the digital albums they regularly release. The last CD I acquired was given to me gratis by jazz singer Rachel Sutton at a gig of hers when I got chatting to her after the gig.
              Every single one of my CDs have been digitised in lossless format and it’s quite a rare thing for me to play a CD now.

    • I have a theory – which no doubt someone will tell me is bollocks – that if plastic jewel cases had been replaced much sooner by digipaks, then CDs would have been regarded as much more desirable items to be fondled and swooned over in the way we have long been accustomed to do with vinyl. I love the cardboard packs with their inserts, pockets and multiple folds all dressed up in shrinkwrap, and they look much more attractive, like miniature LPs on the shelf.

  21. I still have all my CDs that didn’t have any value on eBay 5 years ago in the loft in plastic wallets with the inserts.

    We are currently going through a major de-cluttering/re-forming of how we use our house. The attic will come into play in October I reckon…looking forward to see what I will re-discover.

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