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?
In the world of vintage vinyl DJs & Record Collectors it’s easy to make popular previously unknown vinyl. Public podcasts and even youtube channels (where people post and play their discoveries) are very popular and watched worldwide by many thousands. When a certain Rare and Unknown record was played by a BIG record collector or deejay other collectors immediately put this record in their wantlist and start looking for it, auction prices go up as the result of rising popularity of previously unknown records. The fixed prices on discogs also goes up (sometimes they are crazy). Every seller nowadays can simply check price statistics on discogs or on popsike.com (if it’s an auction). They don’t want to sell you this and that for $5 when market value is $100 and so many younger collectors (especially from Japan) are happy to pay more to get it quickly.
So it’s always important to discover music, to find something unknown before it will be popular among collectors. Then a chance to buy it for nothing is much higher.
Problem with audiophiles is that they want a classic albums (they don’t want to discover music), they want a well know classics, recorded on major labels by internationally renown artists. Look at the Jazz albums for example, the prices are already high on that type of music for almost every album from the 50’s and so on.
Record collectors are capable to discover music from different continents in different genres. They are looking for UNKNOWN stuff, this is the only reason why some good records can be very cheap - because they are unknown (google will not show you much about them, they are not on youtube and you can’t listen to them).
A typical audiophile re-issue label are not interested in unknown stuff, they want to reissue an LP that they can quickly sell in a huge quantity, this is why you can see ONLY classic titles in Rock, Jazz whatever popular. This is extremely boring in my opinion! They can only "sell you" a higher quality of the same well known albums, nothing new. And they want premium prices for the quality, even if the album is boring as hell and every dog have heard it million times.
This is why a second hand vinyl market is much more interesting for people who’re looking for something interesting and unknown, it’s about new discoveries, original pressing can be in a perfect quality (but not always).
I just buy what I like on original pressing (mainly from the 70’s), I don’t care about audiophile reissues because 99% of what they re-issue is boring as hell (and often more expensive than original).
At the same time I can pay premium prices for some Very Rare Originals with amazing music on them, they will cost more in the future if the music is good (reissue or digital will not affect the price for original press anyway).