Sinatra Jobim 8 Track Tape for Sale on eBay!

Times are tough for sure, but right now, as I type this, someone is virtually giving away a Sinatra Jobim 8 track tape on eBay for an opening bid of $2500! That's right, for about $2000 below the usual selling price of this tape...insane!

I'm not going to post a link, because it would only become inactive two weeks after the auction ends anyway, but if you do a search on eBay.com, you'll find it. The tape comes with its original sleeve and is in pretty nice condition (thought it just blows my mind that the seller is trying to sell something for $2500 and couldn't take the time to clean the scuffs off the tape and according to the listing, never listened to the tape!

Heck, who knows, it might have been recorded over with John Denver's Greatest Hits. Even if the tape has been erased and used as an audition tape for a three year old singing "Old MacDonald" this tape should still be worth the $2500 starting bid, just for the cartridge and labels! The tape...which I did not see until today....was previously listed a week ago with a starting bid of $3000 and ended with no bids. Now you'll have to excuse me, I've got to go and see whether or not I can scrape together $2500 bucks that the wife won't miss.

The Most Valuable 8 Track - Sinatra Jobim

I've found lots of free 8 tracks at yard sales and routinely get them at thrift shops for a dime. Almost every church benefit rummage sale has a bunch that have been donated. But that doesn't mean they are worthless, and some of them can be quite valuable. Check out my 8 track price guide, it's a work in progress.

While most 8 tracks that are "valuable" are worth a couple of hundred bucks, tops, for super rare and desirable tapes, one tape at least has sales records to back up its $6000 valuation. That 8 track is pictured to the left.

The album is Sinatra Jobim on the Reprise label. It's a Frank Sinatra album featuring Antonio Carlos Jobim. The story goes something like this...only a few thousand copies of the 8 track were made and sent to retailers. Some sort of disagreement led to the record label cancelling sales of the album and even trying to pull them from stores. The album was not released on any other medium, so the few 8 tracks that are out there are all that exists of this album, aside from the acetate - if it exists.

Over the course of the past ten years, I've seen two of these, both of them on eBay. The one that sold highest fetched $4550 in pretty scuffed up condition. The other was right around the $4000 mark. Both were opened and used. I would expect a sealed version, if it existed, to sell for $6000. Most 8 track collectors wouldn't shell out six grand, but a diehard Sinatra addict would probably love to have the album.

But is this tape the most valuable ever? It's the highest priced 8 track that I've ever seen, by far. There could possibly be something out there that a collector or fan would pay more for, but right now there's nothing I've seen or can think of that would come close.