Second Hand Music Collecting

So most of my stuff I've uploaded to this website has been programming and things I've had saved onto my 1TB external hard drive. Of course, I enjoy playing video games. However, once I got to my mid-twenties, I wasn't getting that same thrill that I used to acquire.

When I was growing up I always disliked when my friends would come out and say "Yeah, I don't really play video games anymore". It always sounded to me that they were just being conscious about their image. But yeah, you need more than just video games and programming to keep you from being bored in your downtime.

At first, I tried to get into reading. Read George Orwell's 1984 (good), Mark Mason's The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck (ok if you are into self help books i guess), Stephen King's Billy Summers (VERY good), then got turned off reading other books. Unfortunately, I found it hard to actually read the books when there was too much noise around me. Now I have like 25 books I may or may not read in my lifetime.

Then, I went with game making. Got turned off by the game making applications like Unity and Godot. Went for a limited game engine like PICO 8. Didn't like how games made in that engine were hard to monetise. Tried out Bevy. Really liked the idea they had going for the project. Never really got past the learning phase.

Finally, I got to retro media.

Back when I was in University, I got really into MUGEN. If you don't know what MUGEN is, it's a fighting game engine with a large creation community around it. People port characters from all sorts of games as well as make their own. The same goes for stages and menus. I'll be honest, playing the actual games you made with all these assets would suck. The thing I was there for was the discovery aspect.

During this time I was going to the websites for each of these creators. How it went is that I would watch Salty Bet on Twitch, type a command that showed me the authors of each of the characters in the match, then google the names to find the creators' websites. Then I would download all their mugen assets, sort them into folders, then write some notes on each author. Looking back, it was a bit of a waste of time. Doing all that extra work.

For a small while, I got into collecting niche game titles I found in stores. However, I very quickly found out that this was going to get really expensive.

Now, enter my eventual CD collecting addiction.

For years I have been collecting things, most of those things retro in nature. Most of those things aren't so popular or very expensive to amass a large collection of "things". However, when it comes to good old physical media, there's always a lot of it out there. About 80% of that stuff is going to be garbage that nobody wants. The rest of that is going to be circulated around like mad. Unlike Xbox One games, PS2 games and trash from old websites, CDs are abundant everywhere. Even in a place like Hobart, there are CDs entering the free market all the time. And considering the streaming services, youtube, piracy and recent resurge of Vinyls, CDs are pretty well priced for collectors. Throw all that together and you have a decent collectors' market within the reasonably small island population of Tasmania.

When I was around 19, I was still picking up CDs in places like Sanity and JB Hi-Fi. Right now, you can still buy CDs at JB Hi-Fi, but the music they have is strange. As for Sanity and other stores selling physical media like such, those stores are online now. Living in Tasmania, those CDs and DVDs have to be shipped across the Bass Strait, which means you are better off just getting the albums streamed. We do have some music stores in Hobart, but you are going to be a bit more open-minded and then you have to be ready to pay 30AUD for an album. For me, I've found the way to go is the free and second hand markets.

To start off, I had a look at eBay Australia. Usually, if something you were looking for was popular at some point, there are probably about 40 different listing in you country. If you are looking for something more niche, then you can probably get it from Germany or something.

However, if you are like me, you don't mind a bit of discovery. This is where my story gets interesting.

Even at 15 dollars, it's still hard to get a collection going if you can't pick up a bunch of items for around 5 dollars a pop. Disappointingly, there are not really many sales going for the kind of music I am looking to buy. I could have bought some "lots" on eBay but then again, they're sold cheap for a reason.

What I had to do was go straight to the source. When I had a day off, I went down to the second chance shop down at my local tip site. When I went there recently, I was there for a CD player. I found a decent one for about 15 dollars. Just had to wiggle the on switch a bit to get both the speakers working. That time I only managed to pick up a Hamish and Andy CD with a bunch of old radio bits. The kinda thing I was looking for wasn't really there either. However, they were only selling CDs for $1. Absolutely ridiculous considering that even the supermarkets were selling chocolate bars for $1 during their half price specials. Considering I didn't really know what I was looking at, I went back and picked up 4 albums, 1 two disc, 3 singles. The 2 disc was 2 dollars, understandably, but they gave me the singles for only 50c! I thought, "yeah, these are probably the stuff that the resellers ignore because there's no value to them". I was wrong. Those four CDs are now some of the biggest staples of my collection. My obsession had begun.

After that, I went back about a week later. All that I picked up was electronic music, mostly from London labels. I figured this was all from one guy's collection so looking for that kind of stuff would give me more great tracks and artists to discover. I noticed some were missing from last time, but there was still a lot there that looked decent. I think I bought back about 15 albums through that dig. Again, they were mostly singles, but I wasn't going to complain. If someone picked those out, then they could have been hits. 1 even ended up being DJ Sammy and Yanou's Heaven, which is something you with probably recognise when you hear it played but not when you read the title. Another one was Laika - Sounds of the Satellites. Definitely not something I would purchase but a nice break from the other more hard style tracks I picked up.

With all this gold I was digging up, I began to wonder; were the op shops (thrift shops if you are American) the same way? I went to a few of the local ones. I got lucky on the first one. Got a Coldplay CD and a something from Milky Chance. 2 artists I knew and didn't mind listening to. I went to a second one just after and got nothing.

The thing is, when you do this, you tend to see a lot of music that maybe a 50-year-old might be into. It makes sense. Most of the music ending up here is going to be from the deceased. A bunch of Christian music, old 60s hits, jazz, orchestral, boy and girl groups... Its probably not going to be easy to find anyone who's into those. That tip shop had baskets full of those sorts of things.

The place I went to after this was a newer op shop for a homeless cat foundation. I got some REM, some Nickelback (it was a dollar) and some Triple J compilations. Then I went back to the same tip shop and everything good was gone again. They probably get good stuff all the time, I'm just never there to witness it.

I was going to go to op shops and tip shops all around the state, but I haven't really had a day when I felt like wasting it going to a bunch of op shops. If you are interested in this, there's more to this saga that I haven't given away. I think I want to have a post where I go to as many op shops as I can get to in a day, but I haven't had time for that yet.