RECORD STORE TALES PART 98:  Five Fun Facts

1. Columbia House used to manufacture their own CDs.  That’s how they gave away 12 for free.  They’d purchase rights to the master tapes, and manufacture their own discs.  Collectors avoid these, considering them to be of lesser quality and value.  At the store, we used to offer a buck less if your CD was from Columbia House.  Some stores didn’t even buy CDs from Columbia House!

2. Places like Best Buy and Future Shop used to sell new releases at a loss, making it tough for us to compete.  A new release might have cost the store $11.90 to get in.  We’d mark it up marginally, barely even covering the shipping and handling cost for the box of discs to be sent to us.  Best Buy and Future Shop would sell them at $9.99 for a day, or even a week, making a loss but creating customer traffic.  And presumeably those customers would buy something else, too.  In the old days, we’d sometimes go to Best Buy and Future Shop to buy copies for our own stock!

3. People used to stick a weighted ring to the top of their CDs to “balance” them.  I can find no further information out about this, but I clearly remember old CDs made in the 1980’s being modified this way.  Customers modified them on their own, with a kit.  A burgundy plastic ring, maybe 1 or 2 mm thick, would be stuck to the outer edge of a CD.  A customer once told me he applied this ring itself to “balance the CD and make it play better”.  I saw these modified CDs fairly frequently, usually with jazz and classical customers so this must have been somewhat commonplace for a time.

4. CDs play from the inside out, not outside in like a record.  This always surprised people.  If you had scratches on the outer edges of your CD, you might be OK.  If you look carefully at the shiny rainbow rings on your disc, you can actually make out how much of the disc is playing surface.

5. Products advertized to “fix” your CD will not.  But they can clean it, and maybe that is all that is wrong.  Most scratches won’t effect the play of your disc.  Your laser can read through a lot of stuff.  One thing it can’t read through is a dried bead of Coca-Cola, so make sure your skipping disc has been cleaned before you give up on it.  But don’t waste your money on a “repair” kit, which will do more harm than good.