The library-sized record collection that went on sale via eBay earlier this week has found a buyer, although the collection, which includes more than three million pieces, didn’t quite fetch the $50 million that owner Paul Mawhinney had been hoping to get. In fact, the final price didn’t inch much further past the $3 million reserve that Mawhinney had set with eBay, although the collection’s final price of $3,002,150 is one of the highest selling prices in eBay’s history. Details on the person who’s claiming to have $3 million on hand are sketchy: He lives in Ireland and goes by the name of jopsoup, and he has 97.1% positive feedback. And it would seem that he’s used eBay to buy music-related items before, although none of his purchases have been this big (not to mention expensive to ship across the Atlantic). MORE »

In case you were wondering just who owned that six-million-song music collection that’s currently listed on eBay with a starting price of $3 million: Meet Paul Mawhinney, an obsessive music cataloger and record-collectors’-guide publisher who also owned the Pittsburgh-area shop Record-Rama. In a 2003 profile of his business, he was quoted as saying “Almost all the guys out on the front line of the music business are all conniving to get what they can.” And given his past history of deals where he’s almost made some cash from his collection, it’s easy to see why he feels this way! MORE »