Words by Cosmic Staff
Graphic by Glitter Records

BRISBANE, Australia — The first phone call came with a number that didn’t seem real. “We’ve got about 200,000 CDs,” the caller said. Riley Fitzgerald, founder of Glitter Records, hesitated when his store assistant, Maddy, passed on the message. “Twenty thousand?” he asked. There was a pause, then a correction: “No — two hundred thousand. Maybe a little less. Too many to count.”

Even that sounded unlikely. It wasn’t.

Inside a quiet house in Balmoral sat a lifetime’s accumulation. It was a private world built disc by disc over four decades. The rooms had slowly turned into storage spaces, with CDs piled to the roof and covering almost every surface — even the kitchen cupboards. Some stacks were loosley-organsied. Others followed the private logic of long‑term collecting. Pathways narrowed. Stacks grew. Entire rooms changed shape under the weight of recorded sound.

“It was a house‑load,” Fitzgerald said. “The count wasn’t far off. 150,000 total.”

A Life Built in Compact Discs

Glitter Records’ team began working at the house in August 2025. The family wanted the archive treated with care, and Glitter Records — known for its deep catalog work and archival focus — was the natural choice.

“His family said his closest bond in life was with music,” Riley says. That connection ran through family ties to Barry Bull and the long‑gone but influential Toombul Music Centre, a place that shaped his early habits as a collector.

That history was clear as the boxes were opened. “We’ve got cartons that look like they came straight from Toombul when it shut down,” Fitzgerald says. Inside were out‑of‑print Australian titles and many rare Australian CDs. “The media focus a lot on vinyl, but CDs are really having a revival right now,” he said. In the collection, Riley and his team have already uncovered several hard‑to‑find 1990s Mushroom Records CD reissues and long out‑of‑print Glen A. Baker–curated Festival Records compilations for bands like The Executives. There were also cult Queensland acts such as Railroad Gin, along with a handful of Ed Kuepper and Go‑Betweens titles — the kind of finds that make collectors look twice.

The house held many formats — CDs, DVDs, VHS tapes, vinyl, cassingles, and cassettes — but the focus was clear. Compact discs dominated. Rare Australian CDs and long‑deleted titles filled the rooms. The collection had shaped the very structure of the home.

The Call That Changed Everything

Even Riley, who has handled large collections and helped clear other record stores, including the old Record Exchange’s now-closed city store, was not entirely ready for the scale.

“When we walked in, we knew straight away this wasn’t a collection you ‘pick up and go the same day,’” he said. “This was a multi-week relocation.” Nearly 15 tonnes of CDs.

A Month‑Long Extraction

The move took about four weeks, working room by room and box by box. Including hundreds of kilometers driven, pallets built and rebuilt, boxes reinforced, labelled, and stacked, rooms cleared and restored, and a house slowly returning to its original shape.

“It was a lot of effort,” Fitzgerald says. “My staff helped. My family helped. The collector’s family helped too. We got to know them well, and I admired how hard they worked. There was a lot of other material to clear — old newspapers, all sorts of things. We shared information, swapped supplies, and supported each other. It was a business job, but I’m grateful for the experience. We got it done. The house was cleared. And the archive was ready to be passed on to people who care.”

Rare Australian CDs Find A New Life at Glitter Records

Now stored in Glitter Records’ warehouse, the archive is in the middle of a long cataloguing process. Most of the collection will be uploaded to www.glitterrecords.com.au and added to the store’s online inventory of more than 57,000 unique sound recordings. For months, the team has been processing a few hundred CDs each day. They expect to lift this pace for the next two years as the archive goes live.

“It’s one of the most diverse collections we’ve ever seen,” Fitzgerald said. “Part of our mission is to connect people with history and with unique music, especially from Brisbane. People genuinely want to know what was created here and what makes our music distinct. There are many rare Australian CDs in this archive that answer that question. It was built with deep dedication.”

A Private Passion, Now Public Memory

The collector never sought recognition. He built an archive because he loved music. Now, through Glitter Records, that music will circulate again.