What should I do with my collection of audio CDs?

[Ready]

I've been collecting music CD's since the 80's. I have around 200 CDs that have been sitting in a closet for close to a decade untouched.

My Tesla does not have a CD player. I don't have a single CD player anywhere in my house. I pay $99/year for Apple Music, which gives me access to virtually every album ever produced, so there is no reason for me to ever want to go back and listen to any of those CDs.

I tried going to the site www.decluttr.com to sell my CDs to them. When I scan them in, about half they have no interest in. The other half have a value of between .17-.22 cents. So if I go to the trouble of scanning them all in and packing them up, I might get $20 for my efforts. It's not worth the trouble to me.

Can anyone provide advice on what to do with these? Would any charity organization want them? Should I just throw them out? Is it possible that many years from now they will become collector's items and will sell for a lot of money again, like some really old vintage vinyl records?

 

[HawkOwl]

I've been collecting music CD's since the 80's. I have around 200 CDs that have been sitting in a closet for close to a decade untouched.

My Tesla does not have a CD player. I don't have a single CD player anywhere in my house. I pay $99/year for Apple Music, which gives me access to virtually every album ever produced, so there is no reason for me to ever want to go back and listen to any of those CDs.

I tried going to the site www.decluttr.com to sell my CDs to them. When I scan them in, about half they have no interest in. The other half have a value of between .17-.22 cents. So if I go to the trouble of scanning them all in and packing them up, I might get $20 for my efforts. It's not worth the trouble to me.

Can anyone provide advice on what to do with these? Would any charity organization want them? Should I just throw them out? Is it possible that many years from now they will become collector's items and will sell for a lot of money again, like some really old vintage vinyl records?

Salvation Army or Goodwill would be happy to take them.

 

[Gumby]

Yes, Goodwill. That's where I buy my CDs.

 

[Sojourner]

Salvation Army or Goodwill would be happy to take them.

+1

Or, you might try selling them for 50¢ each at a neighborhood yard sale. Or posting them as giveaways on your neighborhood's Facebook or Nextdoor page. I unloaded some stuff that was pretty much worthless clutter to me (such as a 20-year old DVD player without an HDMI port) on Facebook recently. You'd be surprised how quickly "free" stuff will disappear from your doorstep once it's posted on neighborhood/social forums.

 

[Midpack]

We have 425 CD’s in boxes. I’d get rid of them but about 80% of my 2600 iTunes music library was (legally) ripped from those CD’s, so those tracks would be technically illegal if got rid of the CD’s. Unless the laws have changed. Otherwise I’d give mine away, we don’t even have anything that will play CD’s anymore (maybe our PC).

 

[anothercog]

Vinyl and cassettes have made a comeback so hold on to them for another 30 years and future hipsters will start collecting them again.

 

[OldShooter]

Two or three years ago I took 100 CDs to a service and had them copied into digital files. It cost $1 each, IIRC. (Its technically easy to do this at home but too time consuming for me.)

Now all of those files are in DLNA folders on my NAS server. Truth be told we don't listen to them much, but at least we have them accessible in a usable format. Maybe I'll copy some genres to flash drives and carry them in the car.

I do have a mixed bag of about 800 songs loaded on my phone, which I use as sleeping-time music on long international flights. Three glasses of red wine, turn on the tunes, and I am out for 8-10 hours.

 

[Scrapr]

My late wife had about 50-60 CD/DVD for her car. Her latest car didn't have a CD player. When I was cleaning up her stuff I took them to a record store locally that bought CD/DVD. I didn't get much but they were out of the storage & someone could get some enjoyment from them

 

[statsman]

We have 425 CD’s in boxes. I’d get rid of them but about 80% of my 2600 iTunes music library was (legally) ripped from those CD’s, so those tracks would be technically illegal if got rid of the CD’s. Unless the laws have changed. Otherwise I’d give mine away, we don’t even have anything that will play CD’s anymore (maybe our PC).

I think you are correct, which is why we still own roughly 750 retail CDs worth of music.

 

[skipro33]

I just googled, "what to do with old CDs" and got 338 million results. You may want to try that and see if any of those sound interesting.

 

[Sunset]

We have 425 CD’s in boxes. I’d get rid of them but about 80% of my 2600 iTunes music library was (legally) ripped from those CD’s, so those tracks would be technically illegal if got rid of the CD’s. Unless the laws have changed. Otherwise I’d give mine away, we don’t even have anything that will play CD’s anymore (maybe our PC).

(IMHO as not a lawyer)
If you took photos of them, or had other proof of ownership like receipts specifying the CD, then you could trash them and your ripped backup would still be legal.

Reality is unless you start selling your ripped versions, nobody is going to hunt you down and claim copy-write infringement.

 

[FDC319]

I digitized mine and took most of them to the El Paso Goodwill in 2012. Last year I gave the remaining 30 or so to the thrift shop on Fort Polk.


I don't think I have listened to any of my digitized files. I prefer Pandora and/or going down a youtube rabbit hole for songs.

 

[Souschef]

We donated over 500 CD's to our local library. The old boat anchor CD player and amps did not work right, anyhow.
We have Alexa, so we can play whatever we want, and bought the extra bass speaker.

 

[Bryan Barnfellow]

I just googled, "what to do with old CDs" and got 338 million results. You may want to try that and see if any of those sound interesting.

Try specifying music CDs and maybe it will knock off a few million results that relate to the financial kind, making it a more manageable 10 year project.

-BB

 

[Jerry1]

I'm in the same situation. Unlike Midpack, the digital versions of my CD's are not even on my phone. I have them copied on my hard drive, but I never listen to them. I'm thinking of just putting the whole lot on Nextdoor and see if I can get $20 for all of them. Frankly, the boxes that they're in (not the cd cases, the boxes the cd's are stored in), are probably worth $20 to someone and the CD's would just be a bonus. To be legal, I guess I'd have to delete the files off my hard drive, but I would assume that in the extremely unlikely chance it was ever called out, deleting them and moving on would be an acceptable remedy.

As for listening to music, like other's have said, I pay for Amazon Music and therefore have access to a much larger music library than I could ever purchase. And, I like new and different music so there's really no point in owning music. So, I suspect in my new year declutter, the cd's will be gone.

Unlike vinyl, I don't see a CD being collectable. A digital uncompressed copy of that music should always be available. It won't ever have the charm of analog. It's possible the inner sleeve/art work may have some value but I guess I'm not up for trying to extract that value.

 

[Midpack]

(IMHO as not a lawyer)
If you took photos of them, or had other proof of ownership like receipts specifying the CD, then you could trash them and your ripped backup would still be legal.

Reality is unless you start selling your ripped versions, nobody is going to hunt you down and claim copy-write infringement.

Receipts are long gone and taking photos of 425 CD's would be way more difficult than just leaving them in boxes as we have for more than 15 years. I realize it's not likely anyone is going to run me down, but I prefer to follow the laws whether I agree with them or not.

 

[jim584672]

Turn them into flac files and chuck or give away.

https://www.exactaudiocopy.de/en/

 

[Ready]

I think I’m inclined to just donate them to charity. It’s easier for me to pay $99/year to Apple to have access to any music I want than to try and manage a couple of hundred CDs.

 

[Ready]

It took me a couple of hours to go through all the CDs and match up the discs with the jewel cases. I was scratching my head as I went through them, thinking how many Barry Manilow greatest hits albums did I really need? Yikes.

I think I must have acquired a lot of these CDs through those Columbia House promotions...Buy 1 CD get 12 free. Except they never really were free because of the shipping, handling and taxes. And the selection was limited so I likely bought a lot of CDs I didn’t really want.

I had to look them up to see what happened to them. It looks like they went through various mergers before they finally ended operations. I never really understood how they could make any money with those promotions anyway.

I saved a few classics that bring back fond childhood memories. The rest are boxed up and headed off to Goodwill tomorrow.

 

[Qs Laptop]

Receipts are long gone and taking photos of 425 CD's would be way more difficult than just leaving them in boxes as we have for more than 15 years. I realize it's not likely anyone is going to run me down, but I prefer to follow the laws whether I agree with them or not.

Maybe repack the CD's jewel boxes on their edges. While you are packing them, take a photo of each layer of CD's showing their spines with the title/artist information. You can get a lot of information in one photo. Still, might wind up taking 15-20 pictures or thereabouts.

It's a hassle but thought I'd offer a possible solution.

 

[Time2]

I'm in the same situation. Unlike Midpack, the digital versions of my CD's are not even on my phone. I have them copied on my hard drive, but I never listen to them.

I have a retired friend in his 70s. For many years friend that got 10s of thousands of songs from bit torrent sites. I had no idea why he collected them, most of his time was spent fiddling on his computer, often trying and retrying altered Windows programs on the computer.
Anyway then movies became popular as downloads and yep, he now has 10s of thousands stored on multiple Hard drives.
Their is something for everyone!

 

[Cobra9777]

I tried decluttr and got the same result as OP... they only wanted about half the dozen or so I scanned, and the average offer was 17 cents. So I was going to net maybe $20 on ~250 CDs.

We have a huge local store that buys and sells used books, CDs, DVDs, vinyl, etc. It's a really cool store. We go there all the time, mainly for books and sometimes just to hang out. So I took my box of ~250 CDs to them and said "decluttr offered me $20, I'll let you have it for $15." He glanced at the first 10-15 titles and said, "$12, but only as a store credit." I said, "sold" and went and picked out a couple books.

That's how unwanted CDs are. I traded 250 CDs with an original cost of ~$4K for a couple used books.

 

[W2R]

I only have about 10-20 audio CDs (too LBYM back in the day to buy any more), and they are stuffed in the back of a desk drawer. I never listen to any of them because I listen to music online these days. They definitely need to go to Good Will, the next time I make a run! Thanks for reminding me about that.

 

[Major Tom]

Urgh. I envy you all. I used to have about 10,000 CD's. I have managed, over the last few years, to pare the collection down to around 4,500, but it's still too many. I used to have a DJ friend in Minneapolis, who had 30,000 pieces of vinyl in his house. He passed away about 15 years ago. Someone must have had fun clearing out his place.

 

[kitesurfer2]

you could copy them to a flash drive and sell me the flash drive all my music is oldies with a few country thrown in. i'll buy anyones flash drive loaded with music if you want to share. i've got more money than time