Holy Shit! World's Greatest Music Collection for Sale!

[Who Shot Sam?]

And I thought I'd gone overboard!

http://www.thegreatestmusiccollection.c ... ction.html

[Otis Westinghouse]

You're their man!

[migdd]

If I had enough jack to buy the collection, I guess I'd be able to afford to spend the remainder of my life just looking at the sleeves. My 10 and 12-year olds would have to decide if they wanted to spend the rest of their lives actually listening to some of the discs!!

[miss buenos aires]

What's interesting is this guy obviously hasn't listened to the whole collection, unless he's been doing nothing but his whole life.

[Richard]

It was on the radio that the collection sold for, I think, 3,000,000.

[StrictTime]

I thought it disappointing that there wasn't a partial contents listing. I didn't expect a whole one, obviously, but I wuld have liked to know some of the rarer/more impresssive bits.

[BlueChair]

Apparently the $3,000,000 sale was an act of fraud!

http://www.galwayfirst.ie/content/view/2608/1005/

Galway web user shocked to get €2 million bill for buying world's largest record collection
BY DECLAN VARLEY

A Galway internet user got the shock of his life this week when he received a genuine invoice from eBay for €2 million which he had apparently spent on buying three million music albums online - the world's largest record collection which went on sale this month.

The massive collection was being sold by Pittsburgh-based collector Paul Mawhinney and the winning bid had allegedly come from a man based in Galway.
However, the bid has turned out to be a fraud.

The bidder, who was signed in as the Galway man, had claimed he would shell out $3,002,150 (€2,021,922) for the collection of nearly three million vinyl albums, singles and CDs being sold by Paul Mawhinney,
An agent for the sale, J Paul Henderson, said an eBay executive notified him on Friday night that the bid was not legitimate and that the bidder's account had been suspended, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.
An Irishman whose screen name appeared with the winning bid said he was unaware of the bid until after it had been entered and that he had been a victim of identity theft.

The newspaper had earlier reported the winning bidder was based in Galway.

"He claims he went to an Internet cafe and got the e-mail with the invoice from us and wondered, ‘What the hell is this?’” Henderson said at the weekend.

Mawhinney said he began collecting the records when he opened his record shop, Record Rama, in 1968. He closed it on Thursday, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family.

"I am legally blind," he said. "I had a couple of strokes a few years ago ... and it's time at my age to think about doing something else with my life."

Mawhinney said on Saturday that he had already contacted six other bidders who had pledged more than $3 million (€2 million) on eBay and three others who approached him independently.
"It's still going to happen," he said.

Mawhinney (68) said that after 41 years he has seen his business gradually erode as the music industry has moved online. In 2002, he considered selling the collection to the Library of Congress, which at the time had about one million albums.

"It's time to go," said Mawhinney. "It's time to retire."

Mawhinney said he hopes that whoever buys the archive will donate some of the rarer albums in the collection to a museum. The six million unique pieces of music in the collection would take 57 years to listen to from beginning to end.

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 $50 million dollars.His plan hit a rough patch as the collection passed the 160,000 mark: His wife told him that either he had to go or the records did. He stayed, and the records went into a climate-controlled warehouse.