In this Saturday’s Guardian entertainment supplement, The guide, Jonathan Leggett berated the soulless peril that is eBay, which he feels is taking the graft out of record-collecting. Here’s why he’s got it all wrong.

After graduating from University, I found myself, for a time, out of work and a bit cash-strapped. With heavy heart, and even heavier rucksack, I marched the streets of London in search of someone willing to give me a decent price for a few CDs. When it became apparent that three quid an album was about the best I was going to be offered, I off-loaded £80 worth of CDs. A pretty paltry return, even if I was on the whole getting rid of the chaff from my collection. Except that in among these CDs must have been my copy of Honey Bee, the second album from ahead of their time acoustic alt-country twinged shoegazers Moose. Or maybe I mislaid it some time afterwards. Either way, I no longer owned it. Which was a shame, because I was really starting to miss it.

For many years, I don’t ever recall seeing it anywhere. Ever. Or if I did, it would have been above what any reasonable man would consider a reasonable price to pay. And then earlier this year, I was tipped off to the enormous numbers of CDs flooding the eBay market. I did a quick search for a few old favourites, and found Honey Bee floating around. The prices seemed a bit cheap, so I bided my time, and a month or so later my patience was rewarded, and at the not considerable cost of £5 including postage, I had ‘won’, in the charming yet slightly egregious eBay terminology, Honey Bee. And my excitement was palpable. I’d waited a long time to hear it once more, and the fact that I’d bought it off a dog with a phone somewhere wasn’t going to dampen my excitement.

Since then, I’ve got my hands on quite a few more albums. Some better than others, some indie, some brit-pop, but all, with the exception of Chapterhouse’s Whirlpool, no more than a couple of quid. And I can probably sell that one on for a tidy profit, if that’s not too heinous a crime. In short, I’ve been loving eBay and it’s never ending supply of cheap music.

Consider this. I was in Virgin today, and I noticed that they’re flogging Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, by Wilco, for £16.99. There are currently two auctions ending in the next 24 hours for the same CD, and I’ll bet that by the end, including postage, you could win both and have more than a penny change out of that 17 pounds. (Or, you could do what I did, which was buy it for £3 off a colleague who was downsizing his collection at his girlfriend’s request. Yes, it seems you still don’t get good value when you sell second hand.) Better still, at any time during the day, you can search for music auctions ending in the next hour, where the current bid is under a pound, and it won’t take you long to find something that takes your fancy.

Maybe I’m missing the point here. Maybe it’s because for all my love of music, I’ve never really been a collector. I buy music primarily so that I can listen to it. I love hearing new things, or re-hearing old things. I have a lot of CDs that I haven’t listened to for a long time, but I don’t have much, if anything, that I’ve bought as eye candy, or as a completist. I’ve done record and CD fairs for years, but mostly, I don’t see the joy. Apart from finding two old House of Love albums and the Cash Brothers debut at the same stall once, and finally finding a stall that doesn’t sell exactly the same stock at exactly the same price as everyone else (£3 where everyone else is £5, and 50p for the kind of random selections you might only listen to once, or, in some cases, might just turn out to be the pick of the year), they’re usually unthrilling and unfulfilling in equal measure. I don’t want to spend £2 for a few hours in the same dank basement as 100 Grateful Dead fans in eager search of a rare bootleg that somehow hasn’t been unearthed before, and yet which they think they will find in a Hampshire basement sale.

Leggett says the fun is in the finding, and here I agree. I love leafing through unsorted boxes, not knowing what CDs I’ll find in them, but who’s to say you can’t do this with eBay as well? just put in a few random search criteria, and away you go. Pick an item, and see what else the seller is selling, and so on. Soon you’ll be on a journey of discovery far away from where you set out. Or am I missing the point again, and is Leggett just the slightly tedious kind of muso you meet at a party who’s more keen to tell you how he found his latest rarity, and not what the damned thing actually sounds like?

I don’t feel ‘perpetually thwarted’. I’ve got two albums I thought I’d never hear again, I’ve not paid ‘extortionate prices’ (he complains that the ‘buy now’ option is forcing prices up - but if you don’t want to pay that price, don’t. wait it out, bid what you think something is worse, and if someone wants it just that little bit more than you, tough luck, wait for the next one to come on the market), and I’m not sorry that Leggett’s years of ‘graft’ may be over. Maybe now’s the time for him to spend some time listening to all the music he’s so lovingly hunted down. He could even surf eBay for a few rarities at the same time.

Tags: Music, Internet