About CD Sauce

CD Sauce is an Australian peer-to-peer marketplace for buying, selling and swapping secondhand CDs. Based in Melbourne, it connects collectors directly: sellers list their albums, buyers pay in AUD through Stripe, and payment is held until the disc arrives. Fees are a flat 50 cents each from buyer and seller per sale, and swaps are currently free.

Why CD Sauce Exists

CD Sauce exists because we spent years elbow-deep in op shop crates, and every crate in the country contains the same dozen discs. You know the ones. They multiply like coat hangers. Meanwhile the albums you actually want are sitting in someone's spare room three suburbs away, boxed up on top of a foot spa, going nowhere.

That arrangement offends us.

People everywhere have hundreds of great CDs at home, barely played, ready for a new life. And on the other side there are music lovers who are tired of renting their record collection from a streaming service, who want to hear albums on real gear — hi-fi systems, stereos, even a Discman (respect) — and who would happily give those discs that new life if anyone bothered to introduce them.

So: CD Sauce. A place for music lovers to trade, sell and rediscover physical music. No algorithms. No "you might also like". Just albums, people and good taste.

We run the whole operation out of Melbourne — the live music capital of the world, and we will not be taking questions on that. The site isn't perfect, but we're at the counter most days working on it. Ideas and suggestions to support@cdsauce.com. We read everything, even the polite complaints.

Who Runs This Thing

CD Sauce is built and run by Roman, a Melbourne collector who spent enough Saturdays digging through crates to conclude the whole system was broken — great albums gathering dust in one house, the person who'd treasure them two streets over, and a percentage-fee middleman waiting to clip the ticket if they ever found each other. So he built the marketplace he wanted to use himself: flat fees, real albums, no algorithm deciding your taste for you. He still buys more CDs than he sells, which his shelves call a problem and he calls stock.

What CD Sauce Is (and Isn't)

CD Sauce is a marketplace platform. We connect collectors — we don't run a record shop, much as the personality may suggest otherwise.

That means:

• We don't sell the CDs ourselves
• We don't inspect or grade items
• We don't physically handle shipping
• We don't judge your music taste (mostly)

But we're not a "good luck, you're on your own" classifieds board either. When you buy, we hold your payment until your CD lands — the seller only gets paid a few days after it's delivered. So your money isn't gone the second you hit buy, and if something genuinely goes wrong (the disc never turns up, or it's nothing like the listing), get in touch and we can help sort out a refund.

We don't vet users or check IDs at the door. The one exception: to take payments and get paid out in Australia, sellers go through Stripe (our payment provider), and Stripe has to verify your identity by law before it'll move money to you. So selling means a quick ID check with Stripe — not with us.

And yes, this all costs money to run. We take a small flat fee — 50¢ from the buyer and 50¢ from the seller on each sale — purely to keep the lights on. Swaps cost nothing right now. We'd rather the music moved than the fees did.

How It Works