Andrew McNeice
A lot of the early Australian pressings on CD are super rare. So it was a Richard Clapton, Boys on the Avenue, in a box of miscellaneous stuff. It’s a $200 CD.
Joel Rheinberger
Okay. So there is a market for the rare CD.
Andrew McNeice
Very much like vinyl, but not to the same degree. Like all records just seem to be high priced at the moment and fetching some extraordinary prices. But what people don’t realise is there are a number of CDs which are also very much sought after because they’re in limited number. They’ve never been repressed. You know, the record deals have gone broke or finished and the labels disappeared. The artist doesn’t have the rights and nobody knows who owns what.
Joel Rheinberger
There’s a complicated ownership for a lot of these things, isn’t there?
Andrew McNeice
Absolutely impossible. So if they were pressed once on CD, only once, then that’s all that’s out there and quite likely all that will ever be out there.
Joel Rheinberger
And it’s not about listening to the music so much, is it, for that kind of collector? Because you could obviously listen to that music another way. You could buy it as a file. You could stream it. It’s probably on YouTube.
Andrew McNeice
For sure. For sure. There are records that you can buy for $15 or $20 or a dime a dozen. But the CD version of that record is multiple hundred dollars.
Joel Rheinberger
Well, okay. What are the collectors’ items that you’re always on the lookout for CD-wise?
Andrew McNeice
You know, a lot of 80s Australian artists have never been, which is just still…
Joel Rheinberger
The uncanny X-Men.
Andrew McNeice
Yeah, exactly. Their second album’s a $100, $200 CD. Their first one’s about a $20 CD. So, you know, but the second album’s terrible. But it’s, you know, I love the first album, but the second one is terrible. So they probably only did one pressing of it because it didn’t sell much. And now it’s worth hundreds. But the record you can find pretty easily.
Joel Rheinberger
That’s really interesting.
Andrew McNeice
So a lot of Australian artists, they are the rarest ones. Okay. You know, John Paul Young, early John Paul Young, a lot of Richard Clapton stuff. Um, just cult 80s bands like Kids in the Kitchen and V Capri and The Venetians.
