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 2 responses by heretobuy

I was referring to overseas shipping, not domestic, which is no sweat. For kicks I tried a few artists I’ve bought LPs of by mail on the linked site, and found none of them:

Trio Los Panchos
Compagnons de la Chanson
Owen Brannigan
Harry Secombe (singing not Gooning)
Malcolm McEachern
Peter Bellamy

You will not blame the domestic seller, I expect. These can be fairly commonplace overseas, but not here. The overseas shipping ask can be three times the cost of the record.
tablejockey, none of those artists have ever been popular enough in the United States to show up at yard sales. Los Panchos, maybe, but none of the others.