by Spectre General » Thu Oct 02, 2008 10:46 am
Honestly, record collecting is a hobby and how many people do you know who would literally blow millions on a hobby? He says he has about 1 million records and 1.5 million singles.
As some of you may know I work in a record warehouse, and we literally have millions of records, literally (many are duplicates of course.) Now, we aren't a private collection, we're a store, but at the least we rival this dude. I've held in my hands, and even played records worth up to $3,000. Nobody is ever going to pay $3,000 for a record that [i]books[/i] at $3,000. Not to sound like I'm insensitive to this but he's talking like record collecting is dead and kids aren't buying records, but that's just not true. Record sales are up, production of new vinyl is WAY up, records will never die. Stores may come and go and that seems to be what's happening here. This guy could [i]easily[/i] make hundreds of thousands of dollars if he let people cherry pick for cents on the dollar, but as a seller he should know better than to expect anything close to book value on his entire collection.
Another thing, the logistics of buying something that big is simply ridiculous, especially if you aren't nearby. We bought a collection of about 400,000 records from a place about 2 hours down the road and it took about 2 weeks of constant back and forth and renting trucks to get that all in our building, and it's been about 7 months since then and we haven't even gone through 20% of it yet. Here's another thing, he's almost 70 and in ill health, what's he going to do with 3 million dollars? 750,000 should do pretty much the same thing for him as 3 million would.
I dunno I know I sound terrible here, the video in that link is a complete sob story, and I hope it works out for this dude. But it's not that nobody's interested, it's the size of his collection and the asking price that are preventing people from buying it. You're pretty much asking a millionaire/billionaire to buy your records and to hire someone else to handle the transportation for you. Hopefully there's some millionaire out there willing to do it but this guy could easily still make more money than he could spend if he let people cherry pick instead of trying to sell the whole thing at once.
It sounds like a case of "I'll only sell this to someone who cares as much about music as I do." In which case, there simply isn't someone who cares about music as much as him, except perhaps some kind of museum, and last time I checked museums don't usually [b]buy[/b] the stuff they have on display. Ultimately, this guys collection is going to get sold, but all of it, in one piece, to one person, is extremely unlikely, and it sounds like he's just not willing to sell it any other way.
I guess if I was answering the question here, I'd have to side with enzfan, I don't want all 2.5 million records this guy has, but I would certainly give him a fair price on everything he has that I wanted, and I highly doubt that number would even approach 1 million dollars. [:(]
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What is love after all
but occasional steps
of a dance.........
.......In a trance?