My girlfriend bought a CD, used (from a major store). Both the insert in the case and what’s printed on the CD itself say that it’s Queen’s greatest hits. But the actual music is something entirely different; it’s an actual CD (some famous group; we’ve heard the first song but still can’t put a name to the artist), just not Queen.
Is it worth anything as a collector’s item, like mis-struck coins are? My bet is that it isn’t, and that we should just return it to the store, but I thought I’d ask the collective wisdom first.
I have a copy of REM’s “Out Of Time”, on which the music is actually Mike Oldfield’s “Incantations”. And just to make it even more valuable, the insert and the cover are “Incantations” too!
Actually, yes, misprinted CDs are worth something. I don’t know what, but they’re very cool and somewhat rare: I’ve never seen (or heard) one.
Don’t return it wanting an exchange, since the cashier will profit from it. Look in some music collector magazines (like Goldmine) for information on those who collect them.
hmm… Somewhere in my vast archives, I have an original audio instructional tape that came with each original Macintosh computer, with an Apple Computer label on it reading “Introduction to Macintosh.” Except it’s not the proper instructional tape. My customer brought the tape in and insisted I play the tape for myself. It starts out with some new age music. It started off with a narrator slowly incanting something like “Sit in a relaxed position… now close your eyes… breathe deeply and rythmically… visualize a ball of light surrounding your body…”
Obviously somebody put the Apple labels on the wrong tape, it was some sort of meditation tape. But the customer’s comment was priceless. “I knew Apple computers were different, and I was prepared to follow their instructions, but there was nothing about computers anywhere on the tape!” I replaced it for the customer, I kept the tape as a souvenir but since anyone could have recorded anything over the audio tape, nobody will ever believe me that this came direct from the Apple factory. Collector’s value: worthless.