Cassette Cover Art Library: Sorry about the lack of Posts..

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Sorry about the lack of Posts..

But it's been the holidays.. I'll get back to regular postings in the new year..
But.. to pass the time, what better than a "Holiday Rant" ;-)..
As some of you may have noticed, I've also started to post covers from a net pal in Australia,
And I've noticed that there are a lot more copies of rare tapes down under, than in the rest of the world..The warm weather, maybe?
However, they , almost to the man, charge 2 to 5 times as much as everybody else in the rest of the world asks for the same items. At first I thought it was just a few pricey vendors. but now I see it's everybody.
The normal conclusion would be that that's because the market will bear it , but I've been checking "completed transactions", to see if they actually *sold* for these inflated prices, and, lo and behold, there are so few that it almost counts as none...
If nobody's parting with the cash at these prices, why do they persist in pricing that high? Is it because in the shops, that's what they go for?
That's poor judgement, because that's the case everywhere, but you can get away with higer prices on the shop floor because of the ability to touch and examine the item, as well as the immediacy of the transaction.. after all, you can walk home with it..

Secondly.. and here's a good example.. marking a tape as "Ultra Rare Cassette" would seem to be OK, if in fact it's *true*, and for some it must surely be, as I found over 20 copies for sale on ebay of one particular issue , and they ALL said "ultra rare" .. so it MUST be true :-)
But seriously..as i just showed, it's misused, or blatantly false..
The example of the website, given above, lists *EVERY SINGLE cassette* as "ultra rare", even, say, a bar coded Madonna one. Seriously..
Although i couldn't find the madonna example with aa light search, i found a "dukes of hazzard" soundtrack listed for 51$.. that's the kind of tape that they throw in the 99 cent barrel around here..
Lastly,, the whole "but it's got Paper Labels" as an excuse to overprice is ludicrous..
Here's the real facts about them..
Paper labels are an easy way for the unscrupulous to manufacture cassettes from scratch.. and except for a certain very few exceptions, send up red flags all over to me..they certainly dont *increase* a tapes value..
EXCEPT.. with very early Capitol/Apple and Decca/MCA/Polydor ones.
In these cases they help date the tapes.. Capitol/Apple used paper labels twice, white semi gloss ones originally from 1967 to approximately 1973, and matte yellow ones for a short period somewhere between 1976 to 1978.

Capitol and Decca circa 1968 and 1971, respectively:

Decca USA , and later on , MCA, also used them until about 1975.. There are isolated other examples, but the point of this is, they're not more valuable because they're *paper* but because they help date the tape earlier.. people that collect cassettes often aren't aware just how early the process of printing the titles directly on the casette shell started.. i've got examples of Capitol 'Special Markets" tapes from 1971 done that way: