How much do large Vinyl collections go for these days?


What is vinyl pricing doing these days? Is good used vinyl appreciating or depreciating?

I have a collection of about 1700 Jazz LP's. 95%+ are VG+ or better (I bought them that way and clean records every time on a Loricraft)

About 500 are earlier (50's, 60's) issues like Blue note w42, NY USA, a few Lex Ave, Bergenfield Prestige, Columbia, Savoy, Verve, Riverside, Atlantic etc.

The rest are OJC reissues, and other later good jazz labels like Enja, Soul Note, Inner City Mo fi etc.

Many were purchased from big jazz collections on Ebay over the years. About 20% were purchased new and have seen only a few plays (given there are so many). The rest were mostly purchased from the Jazz Record Center in NYC and anyone who knows them is well acquainted with the quality of their records.

I estimate I paid about 50K in total for these, so an average of $30. The best stuff was $100 or so on Ebay. The OJC's were $8 years ago new from Acoustic Sounds. Would you hold or sell?

I know the answer is "it depends" but any other insights are appreciated.


128x128jyprez

Showing 2 responses by jyprez

If I figured half of retail on the best 500 as suggested, and then $1 per record for the rest it would be about 15K which sounds like a number I could live with assuming retail is actually still what it was on ebay 5 years ago.

Thanks, Spencer. I realize selling LP's is not like selling stocks on my Fidelity account. The 20% you suggest is a number that i think is in the range of reasonable.

Thanks to those who suggested Discogs. I was not aware of this site before. I tried a few LP's and it works pretty well.

 I think the really labor intensive thing about selling LP's would be to show images of your actual LP''s, covers etc. If you could just list with the images provided on Discogs, and then describe any differences (e.g. "there are some stamps from the radio station on the back of the cover or the owner signed their name or slight wear and water damage on one side etc.....") then this would work. The advantage of Ebay, of course, is you are selling to a very big, international market and I often found myself bidding against very deep pocket collectors from Asia etc. who were willing to pay big (bigger) bucks than I could rationalize (supply vs. demand at work). I don't know how deep the Discogs market is.