I may have access to a large amount of reel to reel tapes and wondering if they would be worth my time??
They are on plastic reels so not metal value. Anything on the tape media itself that someone would want to
process?
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I may have access to a large amount of reel to reel tapes and wondering if they would be worth my time??
They are on plastic reels so not metal value. Anything on the tape media itself that someone would want to
process?
Blanks or recorded? Prerecorded or mix tapes?
Releases of any genre seem to carry quite a bit of value in the collector circles. But hear me out, at this point.
A local radio station came to our recycling center with some reels. I knew that we might be able to sell them to a local collector, since they are functionally not recyclable, so I said they could bring them. That would be better than trashing OR recycling those tapes. They came by with about seven enormous boxes, filled with reels, all recorded with 20-30 years' worth of old commercials, backups, and fillers, to my dismay (note: some station-specific recordings are also valuable but it's a bear finding THOSE collectors). Some were moldy or had sticky shed and I was sure I was going to get stuck landfilling several hundred pounds of tape. But our in-house picker asked to take a stab at selling them. He wound up moving nearly all of them through eBay to an assortment of buyers who purchased them by the caseload. It seems that there really aren't enough tapes to satisfy demand so audiophiles are buying up what old stock they can so they put it into service. That, and they are combing for valuable recordings. A few reels did have to get tossed (we had a water issue and some of the moldier tapes just went too far) but the bulk of them were sold.
If it were me, I'd take every one, and not for scrap.
Last I looked magnetic tape goes for $0.01 /lb ... I don't even know if the buyer is still active anymore.