Comments on: "World's Greatest Music Collection" being auctioned

"World's Greatest Music Collection" being auctioned

anathema — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:30:12 -0800

Do you love music? Do you have at least 3 million dollars? If you answered "yes" to these questions then you may be interested in bidding on "The World's Greatest Music Collection." (single link to ebay auction)

By: anathema

anathema — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:33:45 -0800

More details about the collection here.

By: burnmp3s

burnmp3s — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:35:29 -0800

Luckily, as an evil internet music pirate, I already have access to all of the music in this collection.

By: HuronBob

HuronBob — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:37:53 -0800

I loved the "Get $10 back on this item" promo right under the $3,000,000 opening bid... with a discount like that, how can I afford NOT to bid?

By: Salmonberry

Salmonberry — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:44:05 -0800

And they accept Paypal! I can't wait to see that transaction go through.

By: fire&wings

fire&wings — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:45:09 -0800

2 minutes searching turns up some back story which might have enhanced the post.

By: aftermarketradio

aftermarketradio — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:50:06 -0800

But I already own the Rush discography.

By: anathema

anathema — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:53:54 -0800

Thanks, f&w. Excellent background.

By: synaesthetichaze

synaesthetichaze — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 12:57:37 -0800

He remembers buying 500 copies of a rare album made by Porky Chedwick, the famed local DJ of the 1950s. With the record backed by a funeral home, Mr. Mawhinney remembers buying a casket full of them from Mr. Chedwick at 11:30 p.m. The deal was done in a graveyard, appropriately enough. Great article, fire&wings.

By: UbuRoivas

UbuRoivas — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:06:00 -0800

Every genre of American music is represented: rock; jazz; country; R&B; blues; new age; Broadway and Hollywood; bluegrass; folk; children's; comedy; Christmas, and more. No trip hop? No psytrance? No post rock? No punk? No modern classical? No dubstep? No post punk? No ambient electronica? No death metal? No hiphop? No reggae? Your world's greatest music collection sucks.

By: chillmost

chillmost — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:07:44 -0800

The collection contains many thousands of duplicate copies... I think we know who has all those copies of The Bodyguard soundtrack.

By: Wolfdog

Wolfdog — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:08:52 -0800

...no Latvian pagan metal...

By: slimepuppy

slimepuppy — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:16:33 -0800

3 million records and 300,000 CDs. Not a bad price, really.

By: From Bklyn

From Bklyn — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:31:23 -0800

needs more cowbell

By: McSly

McSly — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:46:35 -0800

So let's say 45 minutes per cd. You listen to them 10 hours a day. That's: (45 * 300,000) / (60 * 10 * 365) = 61,6 years. If you are older than 25, don't buy them.

By: dobbs

dobbs — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 14:16:35 -0800

On his web page there's a picture of him sitting in front of a desk with vinyls stacked on top of each other outside of their sleeves! Who in their right mind would buy this after seeing that?

By: Benjy

Benjy — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 14:18:36 -0800

Anybody have a torrent?

By: UbuRoivas

UbuRoivas — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 14:28:53 -0800

...no Latvian pagan metal... speeeeeeeks! \m/

By: ersatz

ersatz — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 14:44:07 -0800

...no Latvian pagan metal... I'll be visiting Latvia, so maybe I should contact the owner to fill that Latvian pagan metal shaped hole in his ~~heart~~ collection.

By: space2k

space2k — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 14:52:46 -0800

"Paul Mawhinney bought his first record sixty years ago. It was a Frankie Lane song." Almost certainly 99.9% lame.

By: UbuRoivas

UbuRoivas — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 14:58:28 -0800

ersatz: you might like to take an order for leaf hats while you're at it.

By: dobbs

dobbs — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:42:01 -0800

Hey now, space2k! He's got a Tony Orlando and Dawn album visible in the auction graphic!

By: furtive

furtive — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:48:06 -0800

You'd need about 195 TB just to store the CDs if you average 650MB per disk and 300,000 disks. If we put it on Amazon S3 it'll only cost us $29,250 a month!

By: porn in the woods

porn in the woods — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:57:56 -0800

this sounds like a certain Hotline server I used to use in the late 90s. Heh, Hotline...

By: aeschenkarnos

aeschenkarnos — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:05:55 -0800

I'd like to see Google buy it to digitally archive, at least up to the point where CDs can reasonably be assumed to be still available.

By: spock

spock — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:16:42 -0800

It will be interesting to see if this actually gets any bids. It is a white elephant, in that it will cost a serious amount of money to simply move the collection, let alone store/care for it. It also has to be a little sad/depressing to see one's life's work worth so little. At $3 mill, he's only asking Goodwill prices for the albums, and throwing in the 300,000 CDs for free. Hard to imagine how much he had to invest for them, at the time.

By: gorgor_balabala

gorgor_balabala — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:55:51 -0800

Are they in flac?

By: Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 17:11:06 -0800

[1]No trip hop? [2]No psytrance? No post rock? No punk? No modern classical? No dubstep? No post punk? No ambient electronica? No death metal? No hiphop? No reggae? [1] UK; [2] Israeli (remember, it says "American" music); all others - no doubt covered under "and more". Then again, in one of the linked articles he said there was no point in buying contemporary music. So maybe not. (You're right, really, I'm just being pedantic).

By: Ike_Arumba

Ike_Arumba — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:00:49 -0800

spock is right on. My first throught was: This is so sad. He's only asking $1 per album, with another 300K cd's thrown in as a freebie. Wow. Yet no bids so far...

By: surplus

surplus — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 18:12:17 -0800

I have the world's greatest music collection. I keep it all over the internet.

By: awfurby

awfurby — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 19:17:41 -0800

Isn't there a institution in America (I remember hearing about it but I can't remember the name) that functions as a library of audio and is supposed to have a copy of everything anyway? Or is it more selective?

By: panamax

panamax — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:32:20 -0800

Yet no bids so far... ebay sn[i]pers are standing by with their $3,000,0001.77 bids . . .

By: roofus

roofus — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 03:08:05 -0800

This is so sad. He's only asking $1 per album, with another 300K cd's thrown in as a freebie No massed produced items bought indiscriminately will ever be worth a whole lot of money. This is no sadder than huge worthless collections of Beanie Babies or Star Wars toys. He's clearly straddling the border of obsession and mental illness. If this was really about preserving music he'd be selling off the duplicates in order to pay for digitisation of all the vinyl and 8-tracks.

By: ersatz

ersatz — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 03:23:11 -0800

ersatz: you might like to take an order for leaf hats while you're at it. Ha, didn't know about the leaf hats! Thanks for the info.

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 07:39:50 -0800

supposed to have a copy of everything anyway? Or is it more selective? LC is selective. The one in England though supposedly does have a copy of everything (published in England).

By: klangklangston

klangklangston — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 11:42:52 -0800

"If this was really about preserving music he'd be selling off the duplicates in order to pay for digitisation of all the vinyl and 8-tracks." He was selling off dupes to fund the record store he ran and to increase the collection. I'd love to be able to rifle through something like this, if only for the mad Detroit soul sides he must have, but man, just storing the records I've got has been a giant pain in the ass.

By: caution live frogs

caution live frogs — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 11:52:30 -0800

Article says he was in talks with the LC but backed out when they wouldn't pay him what he felt it was worth. Which sucks, actually. Would be nice if he just gave it to them anyway, because if he dies without selling it, it will be carved up at an auction and go piecemeal. As he said, the history of the items is worth more than the actual items, and he has the history. Chopping it up like that seems... well, a shame, I guess, because he can't decide how many millions it's worth to him to see the collection remain whole.

By: anazgnos

anazgnos — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:58:22 -0800

Cross-posted from another board I frequent... "Steve": "HAHAHAHA. I know who that guy is. He runs a store in Pittsburgh called Record Rama, which quite possibly the the most misleading store of all time. If you go on the website, you can find a listing for basically [any] LP that you can think of (which explains the size of his collection). The store is basically located in the basement of a closed down shopping plaza, you have to go down a large set of stairs to get there, and once you get inside it is quite literally a cave, it's super dark and creepy. The store has shelves upon shelves of all of the albums you would find at any second-hand record store, you know "I Robot" by Alan Parsons, Frampton Comes Alive, Styx, etc. etc. and there are probably about 100 duplicates of each. You look around and you start to get confused "Where the fuck are all of the records I searched for?". You look around some more...until finally you stumble upon the window where that guy sits. It's basically like a fast food drive thru window and behind him are rows of records as far as the eye can see. At the time I came there looking for The Clean's "Compilation" and I asked him where it was. He looked it up in his database and said "Yeah... I have it". I asked him how much and he said "$250". I asked him about a few others I had been looking for and they were all for sale for around a few hundred dollars each.... none probably had an actual value of more than 50-60 dollars. Basically the guy just sits down in a cave and hoardes all of this music and really doesn't want anyone to buy it from him. He either has millions of dollars and can just afford to waste his life away in that cave, or he finds a few suckers every week who are actually willing to shell out that kind of money. Insane."

By: 6550

6550 — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:23:40 -0800

Here's a link to an NPR interview with the owner.

By: Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 18:29:37 -0800

I have the world's greatest music collection. I keep it all over the internet. Either my searching skills suck, or there's a lot that just isn't available online. Back when Oink was still running, I was going through a book called '1001 Records You Must Hear Before You Die' and trying to download all of 'em. You'd be surprised how many weren't available, especially the early stuff, even from big names (like Fats Domino). I'm willing to bet this guy has huge numbers of records that were never ever digitised.

By: sparrows

sparrows — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:26:59 -0800

Anybody who seriously thinks most music can be found somewhere on the internet has very limited tastes. This guy's case brings up many interesting questions (and some sad questions). Not one of those questions can be answered in any meaningful way by "hey, it's all on the internet."

By: sparrows

sparrows — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:33:15 -0800

In fact, there's a bid on it now. By a buyer with 204 feedbacks, so maybe a legit bid?

By: spock

spock — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 06:00:47 -0800

And the winning bid is $3,002,150.00

By: spock

spock — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 06:01:54 -0800

Winning bidder from Ireland.

By: bowline

bowline — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 22:07:05 -0800

Winner bidder is apparently not legit.