The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

A one-sided 12-inch Caruso Red Seal record from around 1910 was priced at $3.00, as the tag on its back indicates. That makes around $90 dollars today, which more or less explains why so many are found in good shape in 2023: people tended to take good care of their precious records at the time, passing them on to their inheritors as treasures. Taken as an investment, however, it was not very smart, as they are worth not much more than their original price tag figure of one hundred and ten years ago ...

These celebrity operatic records were status symbols, none more so than the Lucia di Lammermoor Sextet at $7.
That is about $210 in today's money, or about $50 per minute's playing time.
It used to be said that if you wanted to be considered a person of taste, the first record you bought would be a Caruso.
Even today some people find a Caruso 78 and think that they have struck gold, unaware that his records were best sellers and therefore not particularly rare. Perversely, records of some lesser tenors which sold less well are considered to be worth more.
I buy records to listen to, not for their rarity or monetary value, so Caruso is my first choice among tenors.

Yes, owning Caruso records as well as operatic and classical records in general was a considered to be a symbol of good taste. I think it still is.

But, I believe that it was common practice for a phonograph dealer to give away a stack of records to a purchaser of a machine. Probably a fair number of the minty Caruso records we find today were among those. Perhaps they were simply not played much.

I just noticed that Victor set prices per number of singers, this tag below is from a duet of Caruso and Scotti, also single-sided 12-inch. No wonder the Bella Figlia dell'Amore was the most expensive. Choirs are excluded from that pricing criteria, or you would have to sell your house to buy the Anvil Chorus.

Yes, that was the pricing strategy, $1 for each artist and $1 for the record.

I believe many of these were not purchased, but given away when a machine was bought.

vintagetenor wrote: Mon May 08, 2023 6:54 pm
I believe many of these were not purchased, but given away when a machine was bought.

I believe that's an important point.

Victor could give away a 10 cent shellac pressing of their top tier red seal artists as a status item for when you brought the Victrola home. And then some owners wanted to play this.

(Double-click the video above or click this link to go to the video on YouTube.)

That Spencer recording is a great example!

I just found out when cleaning my records that Melba was even more expensive than Caruso. A bargain at $5.00 a pop (around $150.00 today) or, for the dye-hard fans, $50.00 (around $1500.00 today) a dozen! Still cheaper than the same record in England, but that was sold in a nicer cover with a photo of the diva, that I posted sometime ago in another thread.

Melba was notoriously difficult to deal with. When she eventually agreed to record, her conditions included the selling price of one Guinea (£1,1s) which was deliberately set to exceed Tamagno at £1, and the violet label to be used exclusively on her records.

Rather than duplicating content, I will just link an earlier thread I started about a very expensive opera multi-star disk from 1912. It is a discussion of the same thing here.

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