Like buying a puff of air

Guest post by Luke Perman

Over the past year I have spent much time, and money, building my digital music collection. As I have been buying music on vinyl since 1990, I have had regularly clear outs by using eBay, Discogs and sometimes Amazon to resell old, less played records. Sometimes vinyl that I have bought has been worth 10-20 times the original price. CDs don’t fare so well, but usually I can get something reasonable back for them if I bundle several good CDs together.

As far as my digital collection goes, which I have lovingly rated, organised and catalogued, I recently started to wonder what to do with the tracks that I no longer want. I’m hesitant to simply delete files I have paid a considerable amount of money for. Often, the purchase cost for the digital version of a popular album is the same as the CD.

Searching the usual avenues of eBay, Discogs and Amazon, there also doesn’t appear to be much call for resold digital media. That which I can find is sold so cheaply to hardly make it worthy. Where I have had to bundle CDs to create a sense of value, I have to do this more so with digital media.

Looking for other avenues where I could sell on my unwanted files I found Bopaboo, a digital media resell service. This is still in private beta and appears to not have had any activity since December 2008. My guess is that they have found it difficult to find a legal business model for mp3 resale that the music industry is happy with. The music industry has always been unhappy with the presence of a second hand music market. When you purchase music, the cost is simply for the rights to own the content for personal consumption. Second hand sales are a grey area where you are selling on that right to someone new without the copyright owner benefitting in any way.

If I was able to sell on my ‘used’ digital media, I have concluded that the value is not so much in the files themselves, moreover, the quality of the selection, organisation, and my reputation as an authority. The big question is once I have created a great library of music and decided to sell it on, what do I do with my backups?