My apologies for the seemingly clickbait title, but it's a genuine question.
A few days ago I encountered a number of Vietnamese music CDs from the mid-1980s through early 2000s at a local thrift store. While I have years of experience trafficking in collectible CDs, I typically avoid CDs in languages I don't read or speak, as I'm not familiar with their record labels, pressings, and marketability. However, this is unusual enough of a find here in the rural midwest, that it piqued my interest.
It sent me down a rabbit hole of eBay sleuthing I didn't expect.
The market for this content (at least on eBay) is fairly small, so the sold transactions are fairly easy to navigate, and I found what seems to be an unusually high number of sold transactions at very high dollar amounts, and seemingly arbitrary amounts at that, e.g., "$999". Moreover, the sold auctions are predominantly from 3 sellers, 2 of which are located in the same city (same seller using multiple accounts)? Also, the sales across all 3 sellers are to a very small number of the same buyers. At first blush this screams money laundering rather than legitimate item sales.
That said, having bought and sold various types of collectibles on eBay for going on 25 years, I know that the more niche the collectible, the more narrow the demographics are with buyers and sellers, meaning that a larger number of repeat transactions between the same group of buyers and sellers is not unusual. Perhaps not to this extent?
So then I started looking at lower completed sales that still resulted in what I would call lucrative price points, e.g., $25-$150 per CD, and here is where we start to see a much more normal distribution of varying buyer and seller IDs, many more occurrences of competitive auctions rather than fixed-price sales, etc. In other words, sales data that looks more legitimate.
However, included in these results are some of the very same buyer IDs that were engaged in the "suspicious" high-dollar sales... which lends credence to the possibility that those sales are, in fact, real.
My Google-fu doesn't turn up much discussion about this, other than someone asking this EXACT same question about Vietnamese music CDs on a message board back in 2017, but the responses didn't lend any insight.
Is there anyone here familiar with the collectible Vietnamese music CD scene? Are some of the titles from that era that much in demand?
I threw caution to the wind and bought the CDs I found, but rather than just arbitrarily list them at high prices with best offer, I'd like to educate myself more with respect to the dynamics in this genre.
Thanks.
