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Sales figures notwithstanding, a compilation like Big Shiny Tunes will never have the long-tail cultural value of something like Nirvana’s CD-era classic Nevermind.

That’s what happens when you sell colossal amounts of records. But for its ubiquity, finding a physical copy of the record isn’t as easy as you would expect. When I began writing this book, I didn’t have a copy — like so many others, my once-mighty CD collection moved from a stuffed bookshelf, to a dusty pleather booklet, to a bin in my parent’s basement, to the side of the road and, well, probably to the depths of that Windsor landfill. (For someone writing a book about an album from a past era, I’m remarkably unsentimental.) So I headed out to find one.

But when I arrived at Sonic Boom, a sprawling, two-floor emporium in Toronto’s Chinatown ’hood, I couldn’t find a single copy. And it’s not that they don’t carry CDs anymore. In fact, a large portion of the store is still dedicated to selling discs at prices that would’ve made 13-year-old me drool — nothing seems to cost more than ten dollars and its rock and hip-hop sections are brimming with classics, both old and new.

But in the compilation section, amid editions of Now! and various label retrospectives, there was no Big Shiny Tunes. So I asked a wandering clerk for it.

“It’s worthwhile flipping through the entire compilation section,” he told me, while flipping through the entire compilation section. “It should be…well, it’s not here. But check back soon. It’s usually in stock.”

So what gives? I decided to dig a little deeper and email Sonic Boom’s long-time head buyer — and member of Toronto kraut-rock outfit Fresh Snow — Jon Maki. Before vinyl re-established itself as a record-store seller, Sonic Boom would buy nearly any CD that was brought onto the premises. I figured if anyone could tell me about what was happening to used copies of Big Shiny Tunes, it would be him. “We wouldn’t have the exact amount (of Big Shiny Tunes we’ve sold over the years), unfortunately,” Maki told me. “We didn’t keep track of used sales for several years, and that would’ve been around the time we would’ve had most of our Big Shiny Tunes in stock.”