Lobster in a Bucket

The Saddest Music in the World

So for the past week on Ebay a music collector is attempting to liquidate his music collection. He has some health problems that I guess are adding up. This type of event happens all the time. A collector, when faced with a life-changing crisis, has to foist his hobby for the sake of life. But this situation is a bit extreme. A collector in Pittsburgh has accumulated 3 million lps and 300,000 cds. It takes up 15,000 square feet. He claims that he has virtually all of the published, recorded music of the twentieth-century West, in one format or another. And he's selling it all on Ebay. Starting bid, 3 million dollars. So far no takers.

The seller is selling the collection as an archive for recorded music. And I think his description seems fair. But the truth is that archives, whenever possible, are digitizing their collections under the expectation that digital copies will be more useful, and hopefully as reliable as hard/analog copies. Consequently, it doesn't make a lot of sense for an archive to buy this guys magnum opus.

So sadly, that leaves him at the mercy of the type of vinyl collector that High Fidelity gets a lot of mileage out of. Witness the tragedy writ large in the questions section, hungry collectors salivating over their original, not re-released underlined Frank Zappa albums.