The Most Expensive Cassette Tape Ever Sold on Discogs is an Old Deftones Demo

Apparently a rare, early Deftones demo from 1992 became the most expensive cassette ever sold on popular music marketplace DIscogs, having sold back in May of this year for a whopping $5,000 for a tape with four songs on it. That’s one serious chunk of change in the house of flies.

Discogs posted an article recently detailing what it calls the “25 Most Valuable Cassettes of All Time,” although the list only seems to cover cassettes sold on Discogs itself. The Deftones demo, a self-titled one from 1992, features the exact same four tracks on both sides of the tape and has the phone number of the band’s then-manager Dave Park printed on the physical cassette itself. The handmade artwork claims that only 15 copies of the demo tape were ever made, but somehow Discogs says that 28 people claim to have a copy. Music collecting is a murky business sometimes.

The second most expensive cassette sold on Discogs is apparently a promotional cassette from Prince (at the time when he was calling himself “The Artist (Formerly Known as Prince)”) that was given out for free to attendees of the Versace collection show at Paris Fashion Week in 1995 and later sold on Discogs for over $4,600. Then at third on the list comes a demo from Xero, an early incarnation of the band that would eventually turn into Linkin Park, which sold for $4,500.

Some of the other interesting entries on the list include an early 2009 demo from Swedish metal giants Ghost that sold for a little more than $2,000, a 1984 Primus demo for $1,250, a 1990 Nirvana demo for $1,200 featuring several tracks that eventually made their way onto Nevermind, and The Smashing Pumpkins’ self-titled second demo for $1,200. Tape decks are sold separately, as are the pencils to spool the tape back up into the cassette.