Massive Vinyl Collection on Sale for $3 Million

A massive collection of vinyl and other forms of recorded music is up for sale, with the asking price a paltry $3 million for 3 million vinyl records and 300,000 CDs. The seller is hoping that a music archive or library will step up to preserve all of this music.

According to the owner of "The World's Greatest Music Collection":

"Every recording in this amazing collection has been purchased by its owner, Paul Mawhinney, over a period of a half century, and stored in a 16,000 square foot climate - controlled warehouse. Many millions of dollars have been invested in the acquisition and storage of the collection, the estimated value of which is now greater than fifty million dollars."

When I was at Bowling Green State University, they had a really impressive Music Library and Sound Recordings Archives. On my tour of the collection during orientation for my grad school program, I remember the enthusiastic staff member William Schurk showing off some of the more intriguing holdings, like antique wire recordings. According to their website the collection has nearly a million recordings and is the "largest collection of recorded popular music in an Academic Library in North America." Perhaps they have a few million bucks to make their collection even larger?

College radio stations often have amazing collections of vinyl too, but with all the wear and tear, storage constraints, theft, and staff turnover, radio station archives aren't really designed to remain pristine. A working library is quite different from a climate-controlled collection of unopened music.