You Could Bid on the Master of Reality Transfers - But Why Would You Want To?

I don't normally pay much attention to announcements about the auctions of memorabilia: either it's something I'd want to own but have no hope to afford, or the knowledge of its existence is so meaningless as to be wasting valuable brain space I'm hoping to reclaim, but either way it's not worth the time to blog about. But there's something different about the auction for the master tapes - or the transfer tapes, as the picture of the label to the left indicates - for Black Sabbath's Master of Reality, although for the life of me I can't figure out why I find the idea of owning a master tape so striking. Maybe it's because it's such a functionless piece of memorabilia: it doesn't make for an interesting display piece, like a guitar or an album cover would; you can't play it without access to a tape machine (and possibly a soulless lack of respect for perishable artifacts); and the copyright holders might object if you started pressing your own copies of the album for sale. I guess you could buy the tapes and deed them over to Tony Iommi, but I suspect that if he really cares about owning the transfers, he'd be in the bidding.

All of this discussion, of course, ignores the question of whether or not you'd want to buy an item from a company with no feedback score that can't tell the difference between masters and transfers.