When I read this,I wondered what Debbie Gibson records sell for $200 on eBay.I have known for a while Patti Page can sometimes sell for decent money.Why send all that time and money coming to the US,when most of these records can be readily bought on the web for $5-15,or under $5 for CDs?

As a collector of exotica,and some of the more outre easy listening records,I know these can be quite hard to come by,once you get past the obvious titles.Some exotica records have taken me almost thirty years to track down,but this isn't what they're talking about. 

 
Roger



________________________________
 From: John Bondurant <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] 
Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2012 6:57 AM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] What? No more hair-metal picture discs in Tokyo? Quick, get me a plane ticket to the states!
 
"Employees of Japanese retailer Disk Union once spent $20,000 in a day at Nashville's The Great Escape record store hunting for tunes including ones treasured by Japan's soft-rock and easy-listening fans."

And probably only took back about 5000 records. They should have gone to Phonoluxe... ;-)

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Fine [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2012 1:54 PM
Subject: What? No more hair-metal picture discs in Tokyo? Quick, get me a plane ticket to the states!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443696604577647870908169992.html 

this article made me laugh!

Just to be fair, we all know full well that there are many Japanese collectors who place value on great and important American and European recordings. I note in particular the man who ran Polygram Japan in the 80's and 90's. For one thing, his division made the first digital masters of numerous Verve and Mercury jazz masters, travelling to the US and transferring the master tapes at Polygram's Edison NJ studio and tape vault, recording them to a Sony PCM-F1 and Sony Betamax recorder (or so I was told by former Polygram studio personnel). He not only got those jazz classics back in print as LPs, but then he was ready to get them right into the market when CDs came along a few years later. 
Also, his division was first in the world to reissue several Mercury mono classical titles, putting them back in print for the first time since the late 50's. Japanese divisions of the major labels continue to keep American jazz and classical titles in print and take great care with some of the deluxe reissues.

Plus we have Kohji's superb Mercury discography site, and the jazz discography site that he and others maintain. No such a public, online discography resource has been built by anyone in any other place.

But then we have the strange obsessions with hair-metal, syrup pop and cheezy movie soundtracks. Oh well, it keeps the old records spinning.

-- Tom Fine