freecycle jackpot! (part 2)

Technically, it wasn't Freecylce. But the idea's the same. A friend's husband is doing carpentry in a house in East Hampton. The ownerwants to sell the home, and wanted it emptied. He didn't want to bother selling things. So our friend posted on facebook all this free stuff that was in need of new homes. We're talking bicycles, furniture, art, clothing, ceramic tile. And, of course, the subject of this post: Two big metal CD stands full of CDs.

There were fewer discs than the last haul (which I wrote about here). But this was more closely aligned to my taste. As before, there are a few discs that I already have (e.g., Schoolhouse Rock Rocks, Saturday Morning Cartoon's Greatest Hits and Elvis Costello's Blood & Chocolate), and I'll be passing these duplicates along.

There are some that I'm reasonably confident I won't like (Christina Aguilera, Ricky Martin). But I'll give them a listen just in case.

There are a lot of CDs that I'm excited to be getting. Three are as follows:

• Black 47 -- Home of the Brave: I have Black 47's debut, Fire of Freedom, and I've loved it ever since buying it. The combination of rock and rap with Celtic influences was fresh and innovative when it came out, and it's still a great listen. But for some reason I never bought any of their other material. I read a review of one other album. That was a very positive review, but it was clear that the reviewer loved the album before hearing it, so I didn't put much weight in it. Now, I guess I'll find out how the followup to HotB was.
• Blink 182 -- Enema of the State: I saw a couple of their videos years ago, and thought the songs were catchy. I never did buy any of the albums, though. I guess I was waiting to get one for free.
• Various Artists -- Pure Disco 2: There's a bunch of great tracks on this: "Last Dance," "Upside Down" and "Play That Funky Music." But the big thing for me is that The Weather Girls' "It's Raining Men" is represented. I had the single back in the days of vinyl, and have missed it since I don't have it on CD. Or, rather, I didn't until today.

I will say there's one thing frustrating here. I found there are a bunch of jewel cases that have the insert and everything, but no disc. There are others with the disc but no booklet. And there are some with the wrong disc in them. I suppose that makes sense since this is all coming from some single guy's home. On the other hand, more than half of the discs (including the three listed above) are still factory-sealed.

By the way, As I write this, I am listening to Songs in the Key of Springfield, a collection of music sequences from The Simpsons TV show.

freecycle jackpot!

I hit the Freecycle jackpot, Saturday. Someone gave us boxes and boxes of CDs and DVDs. We're talking well over a thousand CDs and over 250 DVDs.

In terms of musical style, this load is all over the map. There are old pop standards like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. There are pop singers from the rock era such as Neil Sedaka and Neil Diamond. There's rap. There's heavy metal. There's country. There's classical. There are a bunch of Chinese and Japanese CDs. There's lots of Jewish music, lots of Christmas albums, and I've noticed one album of "Arabic Exotica." There are soundtracks, and compilations. There are albums of big name stars -- Madonna, Elvis Presley and The Beatles. There are local artists who produced their own CDs.

And, as if to complete the joke, there is an album of Gregorian chants.

I've started going through these, first separating the ones I know I'm not keeping -- duplicates, albums I already have, etc. After that, I'll be listening to the discs to decide what to keep and what to pass on. Then I'll be enterring the ones I keep into my database. Yes, I am anal-retentive enough to keep a database of my CDs. That may or may not be the subject of future posts.

There are occasional Freecycle posts where people are giving away CDs. But they generally get snapped up pretty quickly. You pretty much have to be lucky enough to see the post right after it goes up. In this case, we got lucky that my wife saw the adds just as they were posted.

I've gotten CDs through Freecycle before. There's a guy on Long Island who works in the music business (I'm not sure in what capacity), who occasionally gives away CDs. What was interesting about this guy is that he wanted responders to tell him what styles they liked, and he would then give them bags of CDs (maybe a dozen or so) that were specifically picked for them. I got CDs from him a couple times and I remember picking up and seeing lots of bags on his porch, each labelled with the name of an intended recipient.

I also remember one woman who posted that whe was giving away 500 CDs. She gave me several boxes that had many, many copies of about 5 different CDs. I ended up giving away a lot of the discs to a friend at work who was working on a sculpure and needed multiple copies of a CD. It didn't matter what CD, as long as they were all the same.

And there was one guy from Flushing who was moving in with his girlfriend and needed to get rid of a huge collection of CDs, DVDs, records, tapes, comic books, and other media. I suspect his girlfriend made it clear that, while he could move in with her, his stuff couldn't. He didn't want to bother making personalized packages, and he didn't want to have an endless stream of people coming in and picking through a slowly-dwindling collection. He wanted it all gone at once.

This giveaway was like that last one. A woman had boxes of stuff that she wanted out. On the way over I was guessing that this was a matter of divorce, or a death. Or maybe her son moved out and left stuff behind. But no. She explained that she had been running an eBay business, but was quitting it and this was her remaining inventory.

So maybe what I have to thank is the ongoing cultural shift away from physical CDs and toward digital downloads. I assume that cultural shift makes CDs less attractive to eBay buyers. I, of course, am a dinosaur -- I'm not really comfortable with having music without the CD. I can listen to things on a iPod, and I use iTunes to listen to songs that I have ripped from my CDs. But I gotta have that CD or it doesn't feel right.