1. Buying and Selling

    In Ian’s discussion of his Fall discography, he mentions that he sold some of the titles. I’m sure someone’s already done an incredible analysis of how the digitization of music has affected this aspect of album collecting blah blah blah. But for you young’uns, this is the deal in short. Often, when your elders used to buy CDs (or vinyl - it was harder to do it with tapes), we regularly bought CDs that we - after a month, maybe after only a few days - no longer wanted. These CDs would hang around our apartments, cluttering up the space. That is, until we ran out of money - our rent cheque was due in a week, for instance, and we needed $20 more to make sure it didn’t bounce - and so we’d cull our collections and haul whatever we could to the record store to squeeze out enough to get through the next month. (Of course, when we got our paycheques, heady from all those hundreds of dollars, we’d then blow it on some more ill-considered record store purchases.) I moved about ten times in the first few years of my twenties, so selling CDs was also a good way to lighten my possessions.

    Okay, pretty obvious, right? Well, the problem is - and no one talks about this - that you’d often end up selling things you were momentarily annoyed with it, or because your boyfriend of the time hated it, or because you were just in a different place, that later, you’d end up regretting selling. I’ve sold a lot of CDs, and many of them I can’t even remember owning. But there are two CDs that I sold that positively haunt me for the wrongness of the decision. My decision to sell them was probably due to embarrassment at my own taste (physical stacks of CDs in your home were advertisements of your taste), and now I am embarrassed I was so embarrassed. The two albums are Liz Phair’s Whitechocolatespaceegg and Beck’s Midnite Vultures. (I think you can guess why I was embarrassed of my own liking of these two, and why I shouldn’t have been.)

    So, my question to you, fellow elder tumblrites: what CDs have you sold in your life that you later regretted selling?

Notes

  1. blaaargh answered: Worked at a music store — never parted with cds. ever. From Dance Mix 92 to Live’s Throwing Copper, I have it all still. :S
  2. thevidsarealright said: I went to see The Fall this evening! They were… above average (am now at approx 5 viewings). I’d never sell anything of theirs, like relics of a long-forgotten and slightly disreputable saint…I am also rather drunk.
  3. openapplev answered: I’ve reached for Fu Manchu’s “King of the Road” so many times, only to remember that it was sold in the rent/electric bill purges of ‘03.
  4. imathers answered: Sloan’s Twice Removed. Five times. Because it reminded me of adolescent me. I own it now and won’t sell it again.
  5. teenageart posted this