Another Christmas (CD) in April/May

[Brasil_66_Fan]

Found a 'Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass Christmas Album' CD at another local library used book sale for 50 cents(!) to go along with 'The Carpenters' Christmas Portrait' CD bought at a similar sale back in April 2012. Young people (relatively speaking) must be getting rid of "unwanted" stuff in their spring cleaning binges. Also got a 'Sergio Mendes & Brasil '66 Greatest Hits' CD at another sale a week prior for a buck. Now if I could just get the time to inventory my SM&B66 stuff for that "Who has the most stuff" thread....

 

[Mike Blakesley]

CDs are the garage sale LPs of the 2010s.

 

[Rudy]

What is interesting is that I can get classical CDs, most of which look brand new, for $1 at the local thrift shops. It's a good way to take a chance on something to see if I'd like it or not.

 

[jfiedler17]

It's funny how that changed, isn't it? For the longest time, it seemed like vinyl was a lot cheaper to collect than CDs, but just within the last few years, it's become the exact opposite. Nowadays when I go to flea markets, it's rare to find records (whether LPs or 45s) for anything less than two or three dollars (actually, the last time I made it out to a flea market, I don't think I saw a single LP under five dollars), whereas I see a lot of flea market vendors now selling CDs for as little as a quarter a piece. Same thing with thrift shops - there's one near me that, just less than a year ago, used to sell LPs for a dime a piece. Now they're charging between two and five dollars for them, but they've cut the prices of CDs down from two dollars to one.
They can get a bit too carried away, though; there was one library bookshop nearby that similarly used to sell LPs for a dime a piece up until a year or two ago, but then they tried to up them to five dollars a piece (irregardless how bottom-of-the-barrel the title was) but at that price, they didn't move at all and they accumulated more quickly than space allowed, so they ended up dropping them back down to a dollar. For myself, $1 has always been the magic price to try out something I'm unfamiliar with but looks like it could be promising, so I tend to buy a lot more music when I run into LPs or CDs for $1 or less than I would otherwise buy.

 

[Rudy]

I've noticed the prices escalating on vinyl also, but anything $2 or less, in just about all cases I've seen, has been too beaten up to bother purchasing. Yet there are also $5-$10 LPs that are not in good condition either, and these are from stores and supposedly knowledgeable sellers. Part of the problem is that the vinyl I look for is now 20-30 years older than when I was buying it in the 80s and 90s, so that may have something to do with it. When I see vinyl at estate sales or thrift stores, I don't even bother looking anymore; even estate sales slap a $2 price tag on something that belongs in a dumpster (we're talking vinyl that was probably put into its sleeve maybe once a year). And yes, they are rock bottom, dirt-common titles. (The old joke about Eagles Greatest Hits applies here.)

At first glance, a 180 gram reissue for $20 or more seems expensive, but what costs more? Me, having to buy four or five $5-$7 copies to find one playable that isn't groove-burned, or $20-$30 for a single 180g record that I can make a single purchase of?

At least with CDs, you can usually figure they will play if they have even some slight surface nastiness to them (as long as it is not on the label side). I'll take the dollar gamble to listen to a disc and see if I like it enough.