Now Thats what i call music 4 CD

Christmas is fast approaching and I’m skint again, so it’s time to get back on eBay and start selling my life away.
I’ll never know the value of anything I put up for sale anymore. Things I thought would sell for huge amounts just sit there for a week with no one showing any interest.
But records I post for the sake of it, sell for pounds.

The first surprise this year came with this. Genesis - Tonight, Tonight, Tonight.
A CD single from 1985.
On sale for 99p, sold for £17.00 plus P&P
Why?

Well thinking about it logically, in 1985 CDs were fairly new. CD Singles were even newer. It's obvious really.

The most expensive thing i ever sold was Now That's what i call music 4 on Compact Disc. I worked in a shop at the time of it's release and had just bought my first ever CD player. This was a time when the Now series itself was a fairly new idea. Everyone bought the vinyl or cassette but nobody bothered with this weird new format that cost me £15.99 for half the album. I remember being disappointed with it myself, It only had 15 tracks on it, and most of them weren't the best off the album so what a rip off!.

I had ordered it specially as well, we only ever stocked three !!. In the end it went unplayed for most of it's life and just gathered dust on a shelf.

In 1984 there were problems securing artist rights to release their product on new formats like Compact Discs. It's what kept the Beatles entire back catalogue off the CD shelves for so many years and why Virgin/EMI couldn't release a full CD version of this Double compilation album.

Add to that the fact that it cost £15.99 for one, so imagine how much they would have had to charged for a double ?.
Anyway who would have thought that all these years later the series of Now albums would still be going. At the time of writing this post we are waiting for Now 75 and there are people who collect them all.

So imagine this, The first ever now album to be released on Compact Disc, at a time when they printed and sold very few. It's the Holy Grail of Now CDs and i owned it.
I started the bidding at £5.00, not realising. I suspected something was going on when it jumped to £40 in 24 hours and someone asked if the box had 'patent pending' stamped into the plastic (it did).
It eventually sold for about £ 350
If only i could find something else like that. It's a one off. But if you own a copy yourself i suggest you burn it onto your I-Pod, and then flog it.

K-Tel Presents

Long before Now that's what i call music and Telstar there was K-tel.
A company making money out of releasing and advertising compilation hits albums of the day, and very popular they were to.

The problem was that packing 10 tracks on each side of a vinyl LP reduced sound quality.
Mass production and grooves that were so close together meant that a high pitch vocal could wobble the needle so much it jumped onto track two if you didn't have a brand new stylus or there was a slight warp.
And as most of the people who bought these albums thought that balancing a penny on the arm to weight it down would rectify the problem the chances are the needles hadn't been replaced in years anyway.
Some of the oldest K-tel albums i own are visibly marked were the stylus has dug into the groove of the record so deep you can actually see the plastic burring.

K-Tel also had some brilliantly tacky accessory products that were also on the edge of quality control

Do you remember or did you own a record selector ?

This clever little invention held 24 Vinyl albums, one flick forward of the first album and all the other albums would slowly flick in turn like the pages of a book, clever eh ?

However i also seem to remember that once over half of the albums were leaning to the front the bloody thing it was so top heavy that the whole stack fell over in a heap...

Happy days !, bring back Disco Rocket (LOL)