Shady scams and other silly business ideas to take advantage of earnest new vinyl collectors

just bought collection insurance for the first time

what's involved in this? is it like a clause you add to an existing homeowner policy? I own instead of renting so I am curious.

There's a local shop notorious for this Discogs pricing shit, it drives me insane, but there must be just enough suckers collectors coming around to keep it in business year after year after year. I've heard that he's actually competitive when it comes to super expensive, highly collectible one offs, but most of the shop is like $50 copies of Rumours and shit like that.

It says something that I've lived within a few miles of this place for fourteen years and have only ever bought two items, CDs of the Cosmic Jokers and Krokodil, which were actually decently priced at the time.

damn, seeing all this makes me happy that the only record store I've shopped at for the past year has been an old established one that still prices things reasonably for the most part (Princeton Record Exchange aka the aforemntioned PREX). They are the big dog in this area/state so they get an absurd volume coming through and they throw out some weirdly underpriced crumbs fairly regularly. I've picked up perfectly playable copies with minor sleeve damage of Aladdin Sane, There's a Riot Going On, and Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome from their dollar bin and I got Soon Over Babaluma for 8 bucks among other deals. They will still throw out some stupidly overpriced shit from time to time but by keeping some random good deals sprinkled in there, I think they do a good job of splitting the difference.

xps took a lot of looking. homeowners policies exclude things like record collections. I only have a fraction of my collection on Discogs, and most inusurers require full inventories. and then some will only cover you if you bundle other policies (which I didn't have as a renter now and no car). went with C0llect!bles !nsurance S3rvices, and then documented with video and photos to supplement my Discogs inventory. don't know how worthwhile/able to collect if something catastrophic were to happen, but needed some peace of mind with an unplanned move (and, again, the insane $ figures these days).

(coverage also includes musical gear and books, which are a little easier to document. entry on Discogs has gotten much better, but still maddening to spend 20 minutes figuring out what pressing you have of some omnipresent $3 record (as much as those still exist))

thanks! fortunately I've done all the Discogs entry work already

also, I fucking love Krokodil

I agree I've had some good luck at PREX myself and I love going. There's a newer shop up north here that is pretty good too called Station 1, if you're ever in the area.

yeah, this is almost always my experience too, sifting through the “used” section just to see the same artists every week, usually multiple copies of the same record, for $20-$30 apiece. I get it’s just a way to milk the naive to keep the lights on, but it’s sad. I find I have the best luck these days at actual thrift stores

― k3vin k., Friday, November 18, 2022 8:43 AM (twenty-seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

many of these stores have an instagram where they'll hype their fresh used stock w/a video and i always try to "freeze...enhance..." so i can check the price tags and see if it's worth the trip. it's helped me avoid places a few times. lots of people are naive about pricing though, i feel like a downer when i see folks reviewing the places very happy with their overpriced purchases, or talk to friends who enthuse about places which i know are bullshit in that regard.

Amoeba Hollywood is actually still pretty damn good for a lot of things, tho since their move they just seem to carry less lower-priced used product these days in some areas.

Probably my best ever haul, $1 each in 2003, vinyl lined up on the sidewalk on 4th Ave in Brooklyn:

Same side of the street today:
Aural Exciters - "My Boy Lollipop / Paradise"
Computer - "Come and Dance"
Love Robot
Beatmaster - "Lip Service"
Digital Boy - "This is Mutha F**ker"
Cheyne - "Call Me 'Mr Telephone'"
Rori - "Wild Girls"
Ave Maria - "No Sex Until Marriage"
Stars on Long Play II
Royalle Delight - "I'll Be a Freak for You"
X Factor - "Chemical Romance"
Madhouse - 8
Montreal Sound - "Music"
Colour Box - "Breakdown / Tarantula"
Devo - "Peekaboo"
Sparks - "Beat the Clock / Tryouts for the Human Race"
Janice Christie - "Heat Stroke"
Norma Jean - "Saturday"
Cerrone - "Supernature"
Badazz - "Honk Honk Beep Beep / Hot Box (You Gotta Get Hot)"
Sly and Robbie - "Boops / Don't Stop the Music"
NV - "Let Me Do You"
X - "Wild Thing (Long Version)"

Wonderful surprises and Bargains at flea markets

one of my happy collecting memories is a friend 15 years ago who bought a collection and was sifting out the junk, and handed me a stack of all the 60s Gabor Szabo records incl multiple NM copies of Dreams, with the phrase "i know you like this kind of dollar-bin lounge crap, right? here."

how many “earnest new vinyl buyers” listen to vinyl/own a turntable anyways, I don’t think i want to know. I know there’s some of you on this board!!

― lets hear some blues on those synths (brimstead), Friday, November 18, 2022 8:16 AM

so this is funny. i recently got vg+ copies of two impulse pharoah albums (summun bukmun umyun and jewels of thought) for $40 each. ok not recently, it was something like 18 months ago, well before he died. and this was not some super random find, this was at the brick and mortar in town with probably the biggest social media presence and most foot traffic

the reason it was so cheap was that the covers were utterly beat. major ringwear, water damage on one, both g at best. and so i asked the buyer and the manager (both of whom i am friends with) what the deal was, and they said that it could be very difficult for them to sell records with demolished covers because a large number under-25s buy albums as much to display as to play. i have discussed this with my few zoomer friends and i believe it checks out

been so into Szabo lately. Mizrab is getting pricey!

I love love love the "VG+ record, G cover" deals, sign me up

while we're waxing nostalgic about the old days of shopping: a huge portion of my collection was really built up circa 2003-2006, out of the secondary overflow bins of Low Yo Yo Stuff in Athens. that place did a lot of its business with touring artists coming through town, who would drop hundreds of dollars a visit on weird niche stuff. their main space was then a true hole-in-the-wall, in what seemed like it was once the ticket booth of the 40 Watt Club. but to deal with some portion of the owner's enormous supply, they also had a few dozen boxes, regularly updated, down the hill in a vintage consignment market called Agora (later renamed Atomic, and now moved to another space).

fucking TONS of $3, $5, $8, $10 mildly worn copies of things that are now $35-45 records (if you're lucky), mixed in with relatively uncool stuff that was maybe somebody else's jam, and no Mitch Miller to be found. i didn't know how good i had it!

also round about 2015 or so, there was a great used shop in Bushwick called Northern Lights, basically across the street from my apartment at the time. their focus was on soul, funk, and jazz; pretty good, popular rock records could be found in the $10 range, in good shape. more importantly to my journey, they also didn't do crazy pricing on jazz, even for popular titles, unless they were basically Wall Records. i got my start buying jazz there just on the "I've heard of this person and it's $10, sure" model. including like, 70s pressings of 60s Blue Note stuff. it's not like the stuff is actually, truly rare. they just didn't max out the price and wait for the rich person willing to pay it. unfortunately they closed up shop, maybe during the pandemic, maybe a little before.

my current go-to is Brooklyn Record Exchange, - super nice crew, great selection, pretty regular turnover in the New Arrivals. i don't find many Crazy Bargains, and allowing for the general upward drift of everything these days, I'd describe all their prices as at least "fair" and sometimes "really good." they also pay out reasonably when i've sold them stuff. honestly the only store in NYC that i can wholeheartedly recommend.

many of these stores have an instagram where they'll hype their fresh used stock w/a video and i always try to "freeze...enhance..." so i can check the price tags and see if it's worth the trip

haha yes!! my iphone screenshots album has so many freeze frames of these instagram stories where someone is flipping through a bin at mach speed ... in my case it's often like, i spotted a prelude / west end / warner palm tree label in a generic 12" sleeve ... but which one?!?

ah gabor szabo....miss the days when one could find The Sorcerer used for $3, it's ten times that nowadays ime.

remember when sade when a couple bucks? her original lps are like $30-$40 now

lovers rock goes for like $100!

Pre-Internet I considered record collectors to be an entirely separate category of person that I existed in opposition to, since I just wanted to hear songs as cheaply as possible and they were an obstacle to that. I wonder how old I was when I began to entertain the concept of having a collection and curating it... had to be post-Internet/mp3 era when physical media began to be superfluous. Like, I paid mad money for import CDs because otherwise I was never going to be able to hear that stuff, it's not like now when I'm like "should I pay $40 for this splatter vinyl of an album that I have on CD and is also on Spotify?" What is it like to be 19 and that having always been your value proposition when record shopping?

haha yes!! my iphone screenshots album has so many freeze frames of these instagram stories where someone is flipping through a bin at mach speed ... in my case it's often like, i spotted a prelude / west end / warner palm tree label in a generic 12" sleeve ... but which one?!?

― the late great, Friday, November 18, 2022 9:52 AM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

every single one of these IG stories now, they'll flip too fast through the records that interest me and "stop, pull out, show off" some janky looking Journey lp.

xp iirc same w/ love deluxe and stronger than pride. that's wild to me but i guess sade fans are really really really into sade. which ok i get, they're certifiably great

every single one of these IG stories now, they'll flip too fast through the records that interest me and "stop, pull out, show off" some janky looking Journey lp

moments like this one remembers that while we may be on the internet and physically separated by great distance, we do live in the same world 🥲

my current go-to is Brooklyn Record Exchange, - super nice crew, great selection, pretty regular turnover in the New Arrivals. i don't find many Crazy Bargains, and allowing for the general upward drift of everything these days, I'd describe all their prices as at least "fair" and sometimes "really good." they also pay out reasonably when i've sold them stuff. honestly the only store in NYC that i can wholeheartedly recommend.

― Doctor Casino, Friday, 18 November 2022 17:52 (twenty-eight minutes ago) link

I've gotten some good deals here! I like this place.

lets be real if I owned a shop I'd probably use Discogs a lot too. like how the fuck am I supposed to know that 90's represses of Aerosmith records are worth like, 50 bucks apiece? (my local shop got several in and sold them all immediately) what kills me though is when these shopkeepers don't seem to understand what something **actually** sells for, particularly when it comes to newer, out of print records. I'm thinking of one in particular that was released 2010, was on sale on the band's website for $20 until like...2020 or so, after which copies on Discogs started selling at $30, then $50, and then one person bought one at $90 which encouraged sellers to go $150+. just in case there's one person out there willing to spend that much money. I guess it's one thing doing it online in a global marketplace, where you just need 1 of the 8 billion people on the planet to buy it, but physical stores do this too which is so incredibly stupid. I went to one in Boston which had a bunch of cool vaporwave stuff but it was all priced at like $100+. which the copies on Discogs are going for too, but NOBODY IS ACTUALLY BUYING THEM. even worse considering this was a small shop with very limited space!!

one of the shops i was referring to above, a place in Tarzana, has these tightly packed used LP sections and basically anything that might be somewhat desirable is this aspirational price, they're hoping that one in eight billion person will come in and say "yes i need this".
last time i was there i saw an early blue note lee morgan which was noted as having scratches and a skip priced at $60. at that point you're just acting like the record is a rare coin, an object that you're not going to physically use but just show people.

"a store is a river not a lake" reminds me of a shop i went to in, i think, elizabeth NJ (can't seem to find it on google maps, maybe it's closed?) first band i check for is always new order, i immediately see the store's got a thick stack... pull out blue monday, start opening the plastic sleeve, the owner comes over and points at the sign which says to not remove any records from their sleeve without owner present. uh, ok - turn it over and it's something like $75? flipping through, he has like 3 other copies, all priced progressively higher.

however, definitely not a new shop, seems to have been around for a couple decades at least... think the owner was just a bit of a hoarder!

I was in a friend’s shop about a year ago and a customer found a super rare 45. It wasn’t priced, so my friend looked it up on Discogs, where it had gone for $2500. My friend said to the customers — who knew exactly how rare and valuable the record was — “Is $200 ok?” When I asked him about it he said, “$200 now is better than $2500 never, and they’ll tell their friends and be repeat customers.”

He's got a good point there. I know a collector who has boxes of allegedly valuable comics sitting around, but he's sold maybe a handful of them across a year or so of making them available. Unless you find actual buyers who will pay those high market values, it's not actual value.

that's also the hard truth every sneakerhead / streetwear collector needs to learn at some point. sure, celebrity x might have paid $yyyy for that item of clothing, but how much could you get for it right now if you needed the cash today? because that's how much it's actually worth.

yeah I've got that issue with my collection of Magic the Gathering cards. I've got a lot of old stuff that I keep hearing is very valuable but actually getting that kind of money for it is apparently very difficult. the local shops are straight up saying "we're not buying anything right now" because so many people are selling out at the moment. and all the big shops that buy in bulk pay you like 50% of the sell price so you're not getting anything close to what they're worth. but I sure as hell don't wanna be eBaying everything individually.

my current go-to is Brooklyn Record Exchange, - super nice crew, great selection, pretty regular turnover in the New Arrivals. i don't find many Crazy Bargains, and allowing for the general upward drift of everything these days, I'd describe all their prices as at least "fair" and sometimes "really good." they also pay out reasonably when i've sold them stuff. honestly the only store in NYC that i can wholeheartedly recommend.

― Doctor Casino, Friday, 18 November 2022 17:52 (twenty-eight minutes ago) link

I've gotten some good deals here! I like this place.

― Evan, Friday, November 18, 2022 1:28 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I started going to the Bushwick location pre-pandemic and have picked up some well-priced stuff. Have you gone to their new location in Greenpoint?

I really liked Superior Elevation in East Williamsburg/Bushwick - I got so many jazz albums with beat up sleeves and pretty nice records there for reasonable money. They got flooded out last year and I haven't been to the new location in Williamsburg.

I've mostly been at the Bushwick B.Rex, but have stopped in a couple times at the Greenpoint one! It's nice, though much much smaller. But same friendly staff and same reasonable pricing I'd say.

There's definitely a solid afternoon's worth of record shopping in Greenpoint between that, Captured Tracks, the Academy annex, and Record Grouch. Academy tends to have the most fun and unusual stuff in the new arrivals, and non-crazy prices, but you really gotta hit the listening station because they're maybe not as picky about noisy records as I would be.

record grouch is awesome

or The Little Record Shop in Crouch End which price "to sell" and specialise in reggae and soul in the former case and jazz in the latter.

oh this is good to know, I live down the road in Tottenham and keep meaning to check the Little Record Shop out but it keeps weird hours. Love Flashback, not least because they will let me swap unwanted vinyl and the occasional unwanted promo, and because they have a Pac-Man machine that means my 8yo also wants to go into Flashback if I've taken her to Crouchy to get her hair cut.

I am FINE with VG+ media/G-F cover. I actually sort of love ringwear, and more than that, I love cheap records. Just picked up a copy of Robert Wyatt's Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard, and the sleeve is falling apart but the sound is beautiful.

I'm in Tottenham too, the Turpike Lane/West Green end!

Little Record Shop is fun, the owner is definitely an eccentric but he's nice and is happy to haggle. I went in there with a Flashback bag once and he said "I'm surprised you've got any money left to spend in here!". Good finds have included a couple of well-priced Metallica LPs before they went berzerk, a very seldom seen Alan Vega solo LP and Daft Punk's Homework for £30.

I would also recommend Rise Above over in Archway if you've not been there, it's owned and run by Lee Dorian from Cathedral so has lots of metal, psych and classic rock (original Celtic Frost LPs!) but lots of other stock too. It's definitely priced more punchily, like Flashback, but there are some great finds to be had there.

a very seldom seen Alan Vega solo LP

which one, out of curiosity?

not much seen over here in the UK as I don't think it got a UK release https://www.discogs.com/release/1350726-Alan-Vega-Alan-Vega

ah that makes sense, yes that's more common in the US

I'm in Tottenham too, the Turpike Lane/West Green end!

Ah fab! I'm near Philip Lane! And didn't know Dorian was behind that store - must give it a look!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKWtZnJvPL4

he took the thing from this and put bluetooth capability in it lol

also yes i watch shark tank sorry

I've got a RZA-branded one of those from when he put the Bobby Digital album out

https://images.eil.com/large_image/RZA_BOBBY%2BDIGITAL%2BIN%2BSTEREO-313855.jpg]

lol nice never knew about those. definitely knew about the vinyl killer brand in the late 90s, as i worked in a dj shop and we always kept a couple stocked as a novelty.

Ha. Apparently that was shot in 2017. I remember this 2018 Techmoan review.

It's still being sold. Wonder how successful it's been. There are a surprising number of content mill "shark tank update" junk sites.

collecting anything is probably a bad idea

also we're only a few years out from the CD revival where specialist pop up retailers will offer newly ground down/scratch free pristine discs in flawless jewel boxes in new shrink wrap. "High Fidelity Digital" to play on the wall mounted bluetooth enabled gadget that tops every gen z xmas list

well in that case, yes i do have all of the miles davis columbia box sets* and they can be yours for a lot of money. idk six, seven figures at least. make an offer.

*yes the metal box editions, where available. wtf kinda scam do you think this is? i'm not trying to rip anyone off here.

i saw this the other night and was wondering why people were waiting in line to check out all the godawful thrift store records, assumed it had to be some sort of speakeasy popup http://throughtherecordshop.com/

i would go hang out there. bring my own cigarettes and booze and then get all indignant as i tell them i have no money; condescendingly requesting "waltz for debby" the whole time.