Anyone out there ever used that musicmagpie.co.uk site? The one that is supposed to offer great prices on our old unwanted CD's?
My advice - dont!
When I first saw their ad on TV I remember saying to my father: "I have a CD in the house that will test how much these will try to rip me off for". it was Gerry Rafferty - North And South.
The first thing I did when I looked at the site was to look at the condition of the CD they require and they are stringent, only the best in other words. My CD is hardly played, I had when I bought a 5CD changer in the mid 1980's, within a year or so I realised I couldn’t get it anymore for a reasonable price so I made a copy and packed away the original, case and inserts included. Only ever taking it out of the box to make myself a new copy to play. The condition of this CD is one you would drool over.
I checked up to see the sort of price one could expect to pay for a used one of these, and it is hard to find to say the least...
I found three used ones on Amazon, one seller had one for £16.00 (he said it was used-very good but at that price I have to suspect that is an over exaggeration). The remaining two were £44.51 and £45.01 respectively. A new one on Amazon was a U.S version at £46.95 (plus postage) - there were no CD's on eBay, just vinyl.
Now I know we live in rip-off Britain but even I was not expecting the figure they came up with when I put the barcode of this CD into the box and clicked 'Get value'.....They offered me £2.60!
They offered me 6 times less than it was worth, and that is based on the lowest possible price for a mediocre condition CD and case, in reality, even for a playable disk they offered me about 16 times less than it was worth. OK, they have overheads and need to make a profit but this? I emailed them a scathing email and told them a reply would be worthless.
I've decided to tell you nice people and everyone who I know has older CD's what they offered because I find the extent of the rip-off for this one, undoubtedly rare and reasonably valuable CD to be gross and deplorable. And I fear it is not an oversight, it is more likely the norm. So beware and don't even consider selling to these people.
It might be an interesting pastime - get the bar-codes for the CD you know is rare and valuable and see who gets ripped off the most based on prices from Amazon for example....