“ULTRA RARE 1998 first press!”
Show me a musician who’s released her own CD and I’ll show you a musician with lots of storage space.
When I released my first CD (Just Around the Corner: Songs of love & longing from the 1930s) in 1998, I got a great deal: 500 CDs and 500 cassette tapes for the low, low price of whatever. I can’t tell you offhand how many CDs are still stuffed in my attic, but if you know anyone who wants 499 cassette tapes, I can get you a sweet deal.
Now, this problem is not unique to the music business - or to our era. No less a literary light than Henry David Thoreau self-published his first treatise, A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers. It did not sell like hotcakes, or whatever the 19th century equivalent of that was (perhaps “hotcakes”). But old Henry David made the best of it. When booksellers forced him to take back 706 unsold copies, he wrote to a friend, “I now have a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”
So imagine my amusement when I cruised on over to Amazon to check the current price of that first CD (a friend wanted to buy it from me; I was comparison-shopping for her) and found one dealer had it listed as a “collectible”: “ULTRA RARE 1998 first press!” for only $17.98 plus shipping. Two other delusional souls want over $50 to part with their used copies - one of which is “like new.” Meanwhile, I have an attic full of actually new CDs (and let’s not forget those cassettes) - a veritable goldmine under my eaves. What gives?
I think the issue is that the music sellers only care if a product is rare, not if it’s good. I, on the other hand, care deeply about the goodness of my product. So deeply that I’d rather store this music than sell it. I wasn’t ready to make a CD in 1998 (not that you could have told me that then), but I’ve gotten a lot better since. Seriously, check out the audio clips from Just Around the Corner (scroll way down and ponder why I’ve only released clips of two out of the 15 tracks) and then compare to the opening number of my most recent show.
Okay, I just listened to the clips and they didn’t make me cringe too badly. Maybe I should go into the business of selling “collectibles” after all.
