“Like a leaf, it goes brown,” says George. Although at first the CD format’s benefits included both durability and portability, George jokes about the initial “lasts a lifetime” promise, pointing out radio stations found that repeated playing “diminished them and made them difficult to play.” The metal in CDs eventually oxidizes, he explains, crucially losing digital information that can never be recovered, making them inferior to vinyl for long-term musical data storage.

George, the producer of Laurie Anderson’s groundbreaking “O Superman” and today chief curator of the 2.5 million pieces housed at The ARChive of Contemporary Music, which he started back in 1985. “The CD lasted for 30 years, which is standard for an audio medium,” insists B. The boomer era of ‘Look at what cool records I have!’ is over.” They’re either retiring, selling their houses or moving. “We’re getting inundated with used-CD collections,” says longtime retailer Bob Say, proprietor of Sherman Oaks, CA’s Freakbeat Records, a proud holdout. Meanwhile vinyl is up 22.5 percent and even cassettes are rising to the tune of 64 percent - but both are still small players in the big picture (just 11,000 cassettes were sold in the quarter). Chart analyst BuzzAngle Music reports CD sales dropped another 11.1 percent in the first quarter of 2017, from 20 million copies to 17 million. As he kept warning me while I foolishly clung to my collection, my CDs went from being valued at $10,000 to $3,000 in less than five years – a 70 percent drop that mirrors what’s been going on in the marketplace. Marty bought my promo copies for years until I finally parted company – painfully – with the entire 3,500-odd collection when I downsized from my house into an apartment. With many of industry contacts who’d sell him both record company “promos” and clean copies, Levy was the record industry’s answer to a righteous dope dealer, nonchalantly shelling out cash from his rolled-up stash of $100 bills to fans and bizzers alike. Marty Levy has been buying and selling music in one format or another since 1976, when he joined Rainbow Records, the first vinyl retail outlet in L.A.’s Silver Lake, which he and his partners sold to ultra-hip indie Rockaway Records before launching his own used-CD enterprise Smogtown in 1990.

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