Selling CDs Online

This is a follow up to my previous post, with some notes on my experience so far selling off some of my music collection. First off, it's amazing how many CDs you can buy on Amazon for 1 cent. Of course, there's shipping involved, which is where the margin is - but that's pretty much rock bottom for physical media. So competing in that arena is not something I'm interested in.

At the moment, I've gone through one legal box full of CDs. This is about 150 CDs. Of those, 35 were worth listing on Amazon at the new lowest current offer price. Withing 24 hours, 5 of those CDs have already sold, at an average selling price of $10 per disk. Of course those were some of the more collectible disks, but it's still a good start.

Of the remaining 115, I've decided to add another option to my process: SecondSpin. They are willing to buy most of my CDs, ranging from (so far) 5 cents to 5 dollars. Of the 18 CDs I've checked so far, I've decided 5 of them are worth going this route, which is a pretty decent percentage - getting me on average 2 bucks per CD.

I may post a list of whatever's left here on my blog - $2 each + whatever shipping is appropriate for the set. I wonder if that would get any traction?

One other point: a lot of these disks have upwards of 18 tracks. At 99 cents a track for a digital copy, that's 18 dollars to buy lossy digital copies versus 1 buck to get the physical media which can be ripped to get perfect, DRM-free copies of all 18 tracks. If I were a record label, I think I'd be all over the digital model in this marketplace.