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.
heretobuy

Showing 3 responses by ghdprentice

I did check out the site. I was confronted with a page full of albums at $299.00… $349.00… then finally $199.00… gulping. ‘Ok, free shipping”, wow what a deal. I paid my $14.99 / month Qobuz bill. 
1 new audiophile pressing to 9 used records (8 out of the 9 are in perfect condition once cleaned and treated).
Most of the audiophile reissues I have purchased (usually under $50) have been good. But there have been some real bad ones… I remember getting one of my favorite albums from my youth, Who’s Next, and being completely disappointed… thick vinyl, terrible sound.