Kevin McElhone ruminates about the future of mechanical music prices.
While that is very difficult to predict, I don't think it is necessar-
ily a function of what people remember.  I think that is true of
collectibles from the last 50 years or so, which go through cycles of
people becoming able to afford to buy what they remember, and then
later on wanting to sell those same things.

However mechanical music seems beyond that cycle at this point, and its
attraction should be a function of quality and appearance and interest
and rarity (and to some extent size, since larger items are harder to
collect).

Certainly there was a bit of a "bubble" when the Japanese started
buying, for a variety of reasons.  Now they have settled back into a
more normal situation where there interest is affected by exchange
rates and their economy.

Our market is certainly affected by the "wealth" effect -- people are
bidding up all sorts of antiques today because people have a lot of
money from a strong economy and strong stock market (although many
don't want to move from the stock market while it is still going up).

I can't say I have seen this in our mechanical music business, but we
have been sort of away from it for a while due to our other activities
(CompuDyne, our Historic Hotels, and our move to Eureka Springs).  The
Internet would certainly suggest that there is a lot of interest,
although the higher valued items seem to be more sluggish, perhaps
because of the impersonality of the Internet.

The bottom line?  I think mechanical music is great fun, and uniquely
appealing because it does something neat (e.g., it plays music, so you
don't just stand there and look at it like most antiques), so over time
it has to do well as an investment I would think.  But if you are
buying it as an investment it should be with a very long term time
horizon.

Marty Roenigk
http://www.mechantiques.com/