For those who sold their CD Collection - any regrets?

It really depends on what the CDs are. Regular common CDs are worth .50 to $1.00. But imports, imported box sets, rare ones on Koch, or Collectibles, gold audiophile, and tons more titles do fetch a high price.

I pretty much only bought the cooler items, slipcases with over thick booklets included, mini-LPs, paper sleeve, box sets only issued outside of the US, etc.

Lots of CDs are worth more than $8.99 used.

 

Unless you have highly desirable and rare discs, you will get nowhere near $4-5 for them. If you can't stand them, then try selling them in lots. Even the rarer discs don't fetch that much money (there's really too much inventory flooding the market at the moment).

 

Almost every CD I've ever sold or traded in, I've regretted. To each his own.

 

There are CDs that are not going down in value and never will. There are some worthless titles that are going to go up in value.

I know that there are CD fans out there that consider the format an exact duplicate of the master tapes, but better because they last forever, however long that is.

So all of the poor selling titles but recordings by true artists, and semi-classic cult titles, these are the ones that will hold and even rise in value.

To understand this phenomenon one must put aside their own personal favorites and taste. Buy up these cult favorites and hang onto them for 10 or 15 years. It also helps to know which titles were first to go out of print and disappear from stores right about the time Tower and Virgin closed shop in the US. These OOP titles gone now for 5 or 8 years already have a head start.

So basically it's too late to sell at this time and one must wait another decade now.

 

Really? I got rid of my Beatles '87 and Dylan red lettering titles and did not look back. It was not their complete collections just certain titles I owned, and I liked the vinyl better plus they have come out remastered sounding much better.

 

I traded in hundreds of CDs from the mid-80s during The Warehouse's 5 for 1 deal in the 90s (5 used CDs for 1 brand new CD). Some ended up being very collectible for my favorite genre (80s Thrash Metal).

 

Oh, that does sound like a bum deal.

 

I can't speak directly to seller's remorse as it might apply to one's CD collection, but I can tell you how absolutely delighted I was to recently find in storage two boxes of old reel-to-reel tapes that I thought had disappeared years ago, possibly along with my top-of-the-line Sony R2R deck that was stolen long ago. So delighted, in fact, that I bought on EBay a nice Akai R2R on which to play and digitize them. Regardless of whether I was hearing an old performance tape or a mix tape compiled from vinyl, some of which I no longer have, I have been filled with joy being reacquainted with my "old friends". Perhaps my joy at recovering snippets of long-lost vinyl (which I had sold) speaks most loudly to the OP, but again maybe not, because he plans to keep the music but divest himself of the media, when I had no such choice. When I sold my vinyl, it was gone. Period. And in only a very few instances have I been able to repurchase it.

That being said, I hope the OP will be happy with whatever decision he ultimately makes.

 

At 50 cents they're worth keeping if the jewel case is in good shape. It's cheaper than buying replacements.

 

I agree. Even dumping good music for $1.00 each is not good unless you are moving out of state and really do not want the baggage.

I do not want to deal with an Amazon transaction for less than $9.00. Thankfully I don't have too many low end ones left, they were copied and then dumped 10 years ago.

I did keep a certain type of CD, and that is double albums that were remastered and issued on a single disc. These were bought used and were a good deal at the time, and I like the music. Babylon by Bus, and Live Bootleg are two done really well that I like and kept. I wonder what the Amazon price is on these two?

 

Lets not turn this thread into another CD verses LP knock-up, we all know which we prefer and have stated it many times. Some, like me prefer to have both.

 

No, I was not out of line because it's only those two series that this is so true for. (And a few others) lol

And no it's not just some like you, I also prefer both and own tons of all formats. But those two artists did get newer better mastering on later CDs. It's a fact. And both of them have vinyl that out performs their CDs issues. This is not the case across the board.

But the main thing is both those series of CDs hit rick bottom after the newer reissues. So selling them off early was smart of me regardless of my reasoning which turned out to be sound.

 

No regrets at all.

I'm just glad I ripped and sold my CD collection when you could still make money selling CD's. Now I have lossless files that serve the same purpose without taking up shelf space that is being used for records.

 

No, it's not a fact. I believe some of the Dylan remasters have different mixes ftom the earlier CDs, which is why some people might want them.

I agree, although selling them before they reissue might have been better. Regardless, used prices have taken a tumble. The OP would be hard pressed to achieve the aim of $4-5 per disc.

 

Audiophiles are leaving PC audio in droves!

 

Are you being sarcastic or am I just not one of the cool kids anymore?

 

In mid-2012 I owned 620 CD's and a handful of box sets. Come the fall, I had probably only a hundred left or so. They also got sold or traded for vinyls along the way... But I've never had zero CD's, though I've come close (for a while all I had was 1!). Beginning in April 2014, I started keeping CD's, or select CD's, rather than selling or trading the lot away after ripping them into my computer in lossless format.

Now I currently have 253 CD's (this includes CD singles). No box sets, though. Never going to sell again... I really, really regret what I did back in the summer of 2012. But it did pay off okay, though what I had spent probably was three or four times as much - probably even more. This was when you could still trade CD's at second hand music shops. A lot of them have ceased doing so simply because they don't sell.

In short - yes, I regret selling my CD collection or vast quantities thereof over the years, starting five years ago. Really do. If only I'd known then what I know now...

 

Same goes for me just keep dumping those used cd's into the market so I can em buy up. It is the Golden Age of the used compact disc even the MFSL cd's have come down in price on the used market.

 

I was being sarcastic. One just has to look at the PC DAC market and exploding headphone market as well as other accessory/PC music server markets to see that people obviously don't think CD players sound better.

 

One sign of this is the computeraudiophile.com site is just such a ghost town. The Sony CD player will make a comeback this Christmas!

 

I've never sold my CD's, even after I went SACD...... And now, with the addition of the Genesis Digital Lens running into my Parasound Zdac V.2 my CD collection has taken on a new life.

Oh, and, I don't trust hard drives, so my CD's stay!

 

I have about 5,000 CDs and 5,000 records and have definitely been buying way more records than CDs since 2007. But there's still tons of music that's way cheaper to acquire either used or new (let's not forget that new CD prices have also been dropping) on CD than on vinyl. And yes, there are plenty of good one-buck CDs out there, though I rarely look for them.

I do have what I consider to be a lot of semi-valuable or valuable CDs, but I'm not really tempted to sell them. I have converted all the ones in standard jewel cases to Jazz Loft sleeves, which has more than halved the amount of storage space I need. A huge bonus for me, for only a few hundred bucks.

 

I've been considering going all digital for some time, and my own thoughts and concerns on this I will save for another post, but to anyone reading the MULTIPLE posts discouraging people from selling their collections because of the low selling value, I would say they must own nothing but multi-platimum albums or cutout bin fodder. Over the last three years I scaled my cd collection down from about 10000 to 5000. Out of the 5000, by comparing used prices on Amazon and eBay, I didn't even bother to post maybe 500 of them because they were generally going for less than $2 used. Out of the other 4500, maybe about 4000 has sold, mostly on eBay, and I've made roughly $22000. Keep in mind, for every copy of Strawbs' Ringing Down the Years I sold for $117, there's about 15 cd's like Rufus Wainwright's debut that sold for $2.25. Irregardless, that averages out to about $5.50 a cd over the last three years (starting in 2013 long after the CD sales starting their slide to impending demise). Considering many of them were purchased new from places like importcd's for about $6-$8 I am not out that much money. That's not counting the many that I bought used for much cheaper, which, for many currently out of print items, I'm making a healthy profit. I purchased the Strawbs box set a taste of Strawbs for about $80 new in the last 2000's and turned around and sold it for over $200 about five years later. Granted, my taste in music is esoteric, and if my collection was bogged down in albums like Pearl Jam's Ten, Britney Spears' Oops I Did It Again, or Blues Travelers' Four then absolutely those album would not sell for what it was worth to drive it to the nearest post office for shipping, but this is not the case for everyone.

 

Time does fly...

Year three now. Still nothing.

Stay tuned.