An old friend of mine, Rob, recently told me that he had decided to sell off his record collection. He had quite a large collection but it was unused and sitting on shelves in the back room taking up space.
He contacted a record dealer in Sheffield who called at his home last week with a friend to take a look through the collection.
As they sifted through the collection, some records were pulled out and put to the side; others were left on the shelf. In fact, a lot of records were left on the shelf because they were by artists who no one today is interested in.
They were either very old where their audience are either dead, dying or deaf and no longer interested in buying old records to listen to, or they were obscure artist which appealed to a small market several decades ago.
Rob was convinced that the guys who came to sift through his collection would snap his hand off and give him a nice wad of cash for all of his records.
To his disappointment, they were only interested in about 10% of his collection. He wanted £5,000 but ended up with just £500.
When they told him that the best thing he could do with the rest was to take them to a charity shop, he was a little cheesed off.
The truth is, very few people are going to want to buy Buddy Holly or Del Shannon records. Very few people actually have a record player these days.
Youngsters are even less likely to buy them as they listen to digital tracks on their smartphones.
That’s not to say that youngsters aren’t interested in old music or won’t like specific songs.
Kate Bush’s Running Up The Hill is incredibly popular with young people today thanks to it recently being used in the popular Netflix drama Stranger Things.
This appearance created a whole new fan base and catapulted the song back into the charts around the world 37 years after its first release.
Instead of buying the song on vinyl, youngsters paid to download or stream it digitally.
Incidentally, it is estimated that Kate has made £2 million from that one song alone.
Rob had a few Kate Bush albums which were taken as albums by 80s bands are quite popular now with people of my generation (and some younger) who want to either own records they never managed to buy when they were younger or that they once owned and have since lost or gave away.
Trends and markets come and go, give it another ten or twenty years and those Kate Bush records will be left on the shelves while dealers (if they’ll exist in the future) will favour music from now.
Music itself is an evergreen product, but how it is made available isn’t….
Scroll down to carry on reading…
FREE Digital Copy - No Cost to You...
OVER 30,000 COPIES SOLD AT £19.95!
To claim your FREE COPY, simply complete your details below and hit the submit button!
Send For Your FREE Copy Now!
If music released on vinyl is not digitalised into MP3 or FLAC format and made available online, it will be lost forever and new generations will not be able to enjoy it.
Also, music styles come and go and who and what was popular at a specific period of time will not always be popular or have mass appeal, but their songs can be enjoyed and appreciated by people of all ages… getting it in front of new people is the issue.
Kate Bush would still only be known by those who were fans of hers in the 80s had her song not been used in the Stranger Things show. That one show has given her a whole new audience.
That happens to a few artists every now and then. An appearance in a film, television show, an advert or even being covered by another artist can renew interest in the original song or artist.
South Yorkshire’s Tony Christie’s career was given a boost when Sheffield band All Seeing I featured him in their track Walk Like A Panther in 1999 and when Peter Kay released his version of Christie’s 1971 classic (Is This The Way) To Amarillo in 2005, he was once again rocketed back into the public eye.
Tony Christie released an album in 2008 called Made In Sheffield, would that have happened if he had not had success thanks to All Seeing I and Peter Kay?
I doubt it.
Times are changing, people are not buying records, cassette tapes or CDs like they used to, it is all now delivered digitally.
It’s similar with books – although real books are still quite popular and sales have gone up recently because people still like to curl up with a good (real) book – digital books such as eBooks and audio books are increasingly popular.
The eBook and audio book market is worth billions.
The digital age has blown wide the borders and opened up incredible opportunities for the ordinary person.
When Tony Christie and Kate Bush were first making music, their finished works had to be ‘pressed’ into plastic discs which then had to be distributed to shops across the country and shipped overseas.
The music could only be bought from specific shops and only if there were any copies in stock.
It was the same with authors, their books had to be printed and books were distributed across the world to stockists. They could only be bought from a real shop when they had copies.
Today, that is no longer the case.
A person can create a piece of music or write an eBook and have it online selling to people all across the world.
Unless a person lives in a closed country with strict internet rules imposed by a totalitarian government, they can buy and access digital music and books wherever they are.
While laid in bed, sitting on the sofa, sitting in a car, going for a walk, in the canteen at work, on a bus or train… they can buy what they want at any time from wherever they are.
Now that is powerful!
Because these are digital products you will be able to sell them for years. The devices which read the digital files may change over the years, but the digital files (MP3, MP4, PDF) won’t.
As a bonus, you won’t be left with shelves of old technology to dispose of either.
Digital products cost very little to produce and deliver. They simply ‘replicate’. A new copy is made when it is downloaded.
Unlike back in the day when records and books had to be made and distributed to specialist stores, today you can sell 30,000 copies of a digital product priced at £1 from your own website and virtually all of the £30,000 will be profit.
Sell 30,000 copies of a digital product priced at £10 and you have yourself nearly £300,000 profit.
If you would like to know how to create and sell your own digital products, go to:
www.The30DayTo30KChallenge.com
Kind Regards
John Harrison
PS… In The 30 Day To £30K Challenge you will learn how to create your own fully automated passive income system ideal for selling digital products such as:
- eBooks
- Newsletters
- Membership/subscription businesses.
- Video training courses.
- Coaching programs.
Here’s that link again: