Ongoing History Daily: Fanclub releases
There was a time when your favourite band would occasionally send out a piece of music just for members of the official fan club.
The Beatles were very good at this, especially around Christmas when fans would get records with spoken word bits and musical snippets mailed directly to them. In the 80s, Madness issued fan club-only cassettes. The Rolling Stones, Iron Maiden, King Crimson, Pearl Jam, and a few others released CDs and DVDs just for the fans, although many of them weren’t free. Even fan club members had to pay for them.
Today, these fan club-only records, cassettes, and CDs are highly collectible with some of them exchanging hands for hundreds of dollars. It’s a niche market, but if you have one of these releases in your collection and you want to make a few bucks, you shouldn’t have any trouble unloading them.
