CD Sale Bonus Items

...And by “Bonus Items,” I mean a ton of bootlegs.

On Tuesday morning, we start to sell the late Brent Armstrong’s CD collection. (Please go here to read more about Brent and how this sale is to support his family.)

Brent, like a lot of collectors, acquired a number of bootleg (pirate/illegal/unauthorized) CDs. Why? Because he wanted to hear them, I suppose.

For decades, we’ve had an information blackout on these things, because they have wreaked havoc on the labels’ efforts to license and release proper, authorized editions (from the actual master tapes).

Trust me: it was absolutely awful when we were negotiating to release a proper licensed edition, that would be restored from first-generation masters, and some jerk went and pressed a terrible-sounding mono copy—that people nonetheless spent good money on.

As we went through Brent’s collection to catalog it, we found several hundred bootlegs, and our first thought was, “Well, those go in the dumpster.”

Then I thought...let’s just give them away.

So that’s what we are going to do: for every $20 you spend on real CDs, you can pick one bootleg. We’ll limit you to 10 bootlegs per order ($200).

Depending on how it goes, we may adjust this policy.

And, sorry, but the bootlegs do count towards your shipping costs. (This is mostly for people internationally, sorry. For U.S. customers, we will again do free shipping over $50.)

There is no list of the bootlegs—I couldn’t bring myself to type up all this crap.

Instead, I took photos of the items and you can go here for the photo album.

So you can start to look through the items now and make a list of your choices, because (like everything else) they will be offered first-come, first-served.

There are no warranties whatsoever as to the quality or integrity (hah!) of the bootlegs. We can’t even guarantee that they will play. Because they’re free!

For the folks thinking I’ve gone to the dark side...

If there’s a ton of pushback, we’ll cancel this and go with plan A (bootlegs --> dumpster).

Really, we just want to sell Brent’s real collection to benefit his family.

We’ve long had an information blackout on bootlegs on the FSM board, and that still holds. So please post your comments here instead, on my blog, or email me: Lukas@filmscoremonthly.com.

Thanks!