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Vinyl Buyers: The Premium Price Vinyl v. Cheap Vinyl Ratio

The market share of vinyl in new recordings is driven to a large degree by willingness of vinyl buyers to pay premium prices. Nevertheless, there is a huge pool of cheap vinyl out there; records that sold millions so there's hundreds of thousands of copies on the market and on down. To listeners who buy a lot of vinyl these days, what is the ratio of your budget between premium price/collector price albums vs. low price albums?

Personally, when I buy vinyl it's usually things that never came out on CD, which is often quite reasonably priced, but the sticking point is the price of pandemic era shipping, which is staggering. There was a seller of English folk music on Discogs who offered free shipping on orders over the equivalent of US $250, so I started tossing things and tossing things into the shopping cart (or basket, as they call it in Blighty) to get up to that figure. I finally wound up spending $350. I would say about $150 of that was collector-price items.
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Showing 1 response by bslon

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bslon
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I mostly buy reissues, depending on the label, to replace an LP I have but is getting noisy. But not too many this past year so maybe 10 to 1. Too many of the used I’ve bought recently look good but sound bad, so I’m getting really picky. Feels weird returning a $5 record, weirder yet tossing it out!

I’ve got a short list of used I’m on the hunt for, prefer to find them in person and avoid web sales. I’ve been looking for Peter Frampton’s Wind Of Change, probably sold a gazillion copies, why is it so hard to find? In desperation I even checked Better Records, doubt if I could pay $250 though. But it gives me an excuse to get out and hit the record store, that’s never a bad move.


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