10 Rarest Albums In Existence

9. Tommy Johnson: 'Alcohol and Jake Blues' - $37,100

Rare blues records usually go for hundreds to thousands of dollars. More so if they’ve managed to somehow stay in respectable condition after nearly a century of being made.

What you have to factor into why these blues records are so rare and expensive is that there are no master recordings that you can make duplicates out of now. The masters were destroyed years back, with no way of bringing them back. So when you find one of these blues records out in the wild, especially the Paramount delta blues records, it’s like finding the five-leaf clover of music.

'Alcohol and Jake Blues' by Tommy Johnson - one of the most influential blues artists in Mississippi in the 1920s and 1930s – is thought to have only two copies left in existence, the discs being particularly brittle due to age.

One person who owns a copy, John Tefteller, called it a “holy grail” for blues collectors. John’s collected blues records for more than 40 years and has one of the deepest collections in the world, expanding it further in 2013 when he bid in an auction for Alcohol and Jakes Blues, going as far as $37,100 to get his hands on it.