Guide to Selling Your Music Collection Online

I recently got rid of my entire CD collection. All of my beloved songs and colorful liner notes were banished from my home. It was a rather sad period of my life, touching each CD one last time before loading it into my MacBook. I slowly watched my CD shelf get emptier as the space on my MacBook's hard drive got smaller.

I had over 400 CDs to sell. The first thing that I did was take stock of what I had. I divided my CDs into a couple categories and, through trial and error, figured out the best strategy for selling each type.

Most of my collection was composed of traditional albums. There are two types of artists out there: artists that release collections of singles and artists who intend that you listen to their album whole. Album-oriented fans tend to want the entire album. The price difference between what is available on iTunes and the physical CD price is usually small. The bonus for purchasing the CD is that you get the artwork, which is important for many fans. Singles-oriented fans tend to want the songs. These are easily available on MP3 sites such as iTunes for around a dollar. Buying songs one-by-one is much cheaper than purchasing an entire album.

The other part of my collection was the good stuff. Greatest hits collections provide some of the best listening out there and provide non-stop soundtracks for parties and karaoke. Many listeners subside on individual singles to tide them over until a formal hits collection is released. Box sets command a premium price since they are a collector's item. Their packing is often beautiful with detailed liner notes, an experience that simply cannot be reproduced digitally.

Once I had established what I had it was time to sell. There are many options out there, including auction sites, bulk buying sites, garage sales, or donation centers. eBay is an auction site where items are listed and potential buyers bid on them. Once a sale is made, the hassle of invoicing, packaging, labeling, and mailing the CD is necessary. This is time consuming. Furthermore, fees are charged for listing items so if an item does not sell then you will end up losing money. For bulk buying sites such as SecondSpin.com, the time-consuming task is entering in the UPC for all of the CDs you are interested in selling. Once the UPCs are entered the CDs can be packed in a single box and shipped to SecondSpin.com. They will credit your PayPal account upon review.

Before you start selling you need to discard the notion of what you paid for each CD. Completely remove it from your head. Expecting to recoup more than a small fraction of the price for each CD is a recipe for disappointment.

For singles-oriented albums, SecondSpin.com is definitely the way to go. You can expect the prices offered to be low since there are loads of people out there also trying to sell these albums since the songs have often been uploaded into a music player anyways. Being offered 99 cents for a CD you paid $15 may be painful but holding onto it any longer is not going to fetch you a better price. A good barometer is to check eBay or Amazon Marketplace; if there are copies of the item without bids then that should be a good indicator of the demand. My individual Madonna CDs went for 99 cents but her greatest hits collection went for $3.

For album-oriented artists you have two options. The first is to use SecondSpin.com once again. You will fetch more premium prices in general but still within the two to four dollar range depending on demand for the artist. Another option is to bundle them together if you have something compelling to offer. For instance, I owned the entire Belle & Sebastian catalog and fetched a price much higher on eBay than I would have selling them individually on SecondSpin.com. But, using eBay, I had to deal with the hassle of packing and shipping.

For greatest hits collections, I would recommend SecondSpin.com once again. These can often command generous prices. My Creedence Clearwater Revival greatest hits CD, which I had bought used years ago, commanded $5. For box sets that are in like new condition, eBay is the best route if you can handle all of the shipping tasks. Be sure to accurately describe the condition. People that purchase box sets tend to have higher quality standards and will pay top dollar to avoid the expense of buying it brand new. I fetched upwards of $40 on my Miles Davis collections.

For anything that you are unable to sell, donate it or recycle it. With a little motivation, using these strategies should help you live a CD-free lifestyle. Be sure to digitize your collection on your computer first since you don't want to lose the music, just the CDs. In case you were wondering, selling my 400 CDs netted me over $1000, about an average of $2.50 per disc. That's a pretty good deal and I'll bet you could get one as well.