Barenaked Ladies cassette tape sells for US$500

They had the hit song If I Had $1,000,000. Well, it seems as if Barenaked Ladies vintage tapes are selling for — if not a million dollars — a pretty penny.

Toronto record store Neurotica Records has sold the group’s first demo tape Buck Naked, when it was just Steven Page and Ed Robertson in the band, for US$500.

“I put it online and it sold within two days,” store owner Scott Cramer told CityNews. “It was their very first demo and it’s actually a really good tape. They covered Talking Heads’s Psycho Killer on it.”

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Cramer has owned the store for years and has noticed a steady increase in cassette sales over the last several months.

“I have people coming in all the time buying cassettes,” he said.

While cassette sales haven’t seen the resurgence that vinyl has, sales of the retro format has jumped 14 per cent since 2017.

According to Nielsen, around 8,500 cassette tapes sold this year. That does not include vintage tape sales like the Barenaked Ladies one.