Keep Diggin'! Ever find "valuable" $econd hand records?

[jaetee]

Have you ever been digging through thrift store/garage sale records and stumbled across vinyl that turned out to be rare and salable?

First and foremost, I go into thrift and used record stores looking for music and gear that I like. But in the last year I'm noticing that some records somehow trigger the "hey, I think this one might be valuable" thought process... And when that happens I usually err on the side of caution and buy them for the odd $1 or so. Especially with certain Jazz and Samba records. Odds are that I'll find some redeeming quality in the music. And that has proven to be worthwhile simply for exposure to new, old music. It's been a very fun and mind-expanding exercise...

Well, today I finally sat down and did some research, and irrespective of talking about music you really like and would have bought anyway, I thought it would be fun to share some of my results and ask any of you who might have done the same to quantify the "what if" value of some of the records you've picked.

Based on sold ebay auctions in advanced search, I sorted by "highest price first, incl shipping" and found I've actually done pretty well...

Please post some of your examples, or take this as incentive to hit some thrifts and spend some extra time digging through those old estate sale record collections.... It might be worth it for you!

Here are some of my recent finds, and max actual sale price I saw on eBay:

Dollar Brand-Sangoma $1 - ebay max $24
*Run DMC-Raising Hell $1 - ebay max $39
Osamu-Masterless Samurai $0.25 - ebay max $11
*Star Wars & Other Galactic Funk by Meco $1 - ebay max $24
Billy Hart-Enchance $1 - ebay max $28
*Buckwheat Zydeco $1 - ebay max $12.50
*Meco-Encounters of Every Kind $0.25 - ebay max $15
Lalo Shifrin-Bossa Nova (audiophile) $1 - ebay max $80 sealed, $50 used
*Francis A. Sinatra & Edward K. Ellington $0.25 - ebay max $20
*Ramsey Lewis Trio-Another Voyage $1 - ebay max $8
*Bing Crosby & Lewis Armstrong $1 - ebay max $15
*Louis Armstrong (impact/France) $1 - ebay max $15
*DG Karajan/Berlin Beethoven's 5th $1 - ebay max $9
*DG Karajan & Anne-Sophie Mutter Brahms Violin Concerto $1 - ebay max $19
*Duran Duran-White Lines 12" $3 - ebay max $25

*means I knew the artist and there was a good chance I would like the music. no asterisk means it was a total shot in the dark.

So that's less than $20 spent, which (if stars aligned perfectly and I got max price for each) might have netted upwards of $200 in profit. Makes me wonder how many valuable records I have missed over the years...

 

[BubbaH]

Years ago when I lived up North, there was no record shop, so my only option to buy locally was a yearly trade show. In 1999 I picked up Guns N Roses Live era for around 30 dollars at the trade. Now you rarely see that album for less than 200 dollars, and I have seen it as high as 500. Of course those are ebay prices.

I guess if anyone managed to get their hands on any mid to late 90's originals of certain albums they'd be sitting on a small gold mine at this point. Some albums that come to mind are ACDC Ballbreaker, and Stiff Upper Lip, Ozzy's Ozzmosis, Slash's first Snakepit album. Mind you, you likely wont be finding those in dollar bins at the Village or Goodwill.

 

[Northwinds]

Years ago when I lived up North, there was no record shop, so my only option to buy locally was a yearly trade show. In 1999 I picked up Guns N Roses Live era for around 30 dollars at the trade. Now you rarely see that album for less than 200 dollars, and I have seen it as high as 500. Of course those are ebay prices

Live Like a Suicide, I still have a copy filed. Supposed to be around 500 copies on UZI/Suicide. A lot of eBay sellers used to image the back cover of Lies Lies Lies and try to sell it as the the original. Great album indeed!

 

[BubbaH]

Live Like a Suicide, I still have a copy filed. Supposed to be around 500 copies on UZI/Suicide. A lot of eBay sellers used to image the back cover of Lies Lies Lies and try to sell it as the the original. Great album indeed!

Not sure if you had noticed, but I recently picked up (which im sure you already have as well) the Robot Rape original of Appetite For Destruction, mentioned in another thread. While nowhere near as rare as Live Like A Suicide, a gem no doubt. Someday I'd like to have a copy of Live Like A Suicide. Live Era will do though. As it is a great album as well.

 

[Dazen1]

I can't comment on vinyl as it has been a long time since I bought a record, but don't forget CDs! There are plenty of those silver discs that go for good money these days if you know what to look for.

With so many people throwing out their collections, now is the perfect time to watch out for those Black Triangle and Target releases (for example) that are so coveted.

 

[orange]

I once sold on ebay very briefly and got out of it when I saw I couldn't keep the overhead up with enough merchandise and wisely decided it was over my head. I also chose to start right after Hurricane Katrina, meaning that the South Coast refineries were shut down and the first round of record fuel prices meant the USPS was on a slowdown to save scarce funds and UPS etc were adding nasty surcharges. It took 19 days to get two 1999 Kenwood components (a pre/control amp and amp) to Dallas, Texas. One more sale and I was done. I donated the last two items I had listed to my sister for her yard sale to get gas money and raise the kids and she of course got lowballed IMO.

But selling records for the resale value? No, although I did sell some CDs once or twice to pawns. Seven copies of good Andy Williams or Herb Alpert albums are not enough...they aren't made anymore. I did trade some old 78s to a friend's mother to cover a debt that include Vaughn Monroe's Ghost Riders In The Sky, Marlene Dietrich and a few early Peter Pan/Golden plastic 78 records, one featuring Art Carney.

 

[Lazarus Short]

At a garage sale, I once found a half-speed mastered LP by a well-known rock band. I sold it at an LP shop, but the fellow looked it over in minute detail, found some minor flaw and offered me $5. I could have done better on ebay.

 

[nobody]

I do a fair amount of wandering around thrift stores and flea markets so I have occasionally stumbled on some pretty valuable records super cheap. Best score was running across a box of original Blue Notes and a couple Prestige and Riversides at a thrift shop for a quarter each. Got about 20 or so ranging in value from around 20 bucks up to a couple hundred, all in quite good condition. But I've always been hesitant to sell vinyl online just because I'm afraid even if I tried to describe condition accurately there'd be a problem and I've never shipped vinyl so scared it would get damaged in the mail. I ended up keeping about half and traded the ones I didn't want in to a local record shop where I got pretty much crap in trade compared to their real value but certainly got significantly more than the quarter each I paid. So yeah, if you don't have a lot of money tied up in 'em, trading in at a local record store is fine and you usually get more in trade than cash. I I ended up bringing in stuff I paid very little for and didn't want and walked out with a nice stack of new records. But if you're looking to get anything near full value you're out of luck, figure on having to do a little back and forth if you want to even get half of retail at best, which makes sense as they have to make their cut. You'd have to sell individually to end users to get full value out of 'em.

 

[Northwinds]

I do a fair amount of wandering around thrift stores and flea markets so I have occasionally stumbled on some pretty valuable records super cheap. Best score was running across a box of original Blue Notes and a couple Prestige and Riversides at a thrift shop for a quarter each

I hit a deal like that early this year when the fleamarket just opened. Got over 100 original Bluenotes, Riverside and Prestige lps VG to NM. I paid $100 for them all and flipped them for almost $4k

If anybody needs help selling vinyl collections, send 'em to me and we can work out some sort of split. I sell and handle the shipping, you get a precentage, usually I try to do 50/50 for friends (factor in the cost of mailers, gas to ship, time researching and you see I really make little doing this). While I am out of work, this is what I do to survive and I am darn good at it with a heck of a rep for accurate grading and fair pricing. Herb Alpert and that stuff is worthless but get into some decent stuff and there is a few dollars to be made indeed. sometimes very good money

As for CD's, very few are worth anything unless they are MFSL's, original AAD releases or SACD's. There is plenty of obscure Heavy Metal cd's that do command good money but they are not stuff you usually happen upon in a thrift or fleamarket

 

[nobody]

I may well be way off, but I honestly think that a few years down the road you're going to see CDs as collectibles come back. Like 'em or not, and frankly I prefer vinyl and dumped all my CDs a few years back with no intention to rebuild, they were the last physical format to be distributed on a mass scale that people connected with where sound quality was at least ostensibly a driving factor to their development. A whole generation grew up with them as the ultimate medium and while you can get the same sound with lossless files and various competing and never really getting critical mass high res solutions, the CD was a physical thing, which is necessary for a collectible market. And people like to collect things, often it is not so much about the individual objects but people want physical product and music lovers like to collect physical things. I tend to think there is every chance that we are now in the great CD dump that people will be sorry about in a decade when they try to rebuild what was dumped for pennies, much the way you saw collections of vinyl vanish for practically nothing only to come back at 5 times the price as collectibles. And yes, for CDs the condition and the fact that most people treated them like crap will similarly be important. I'm not really interested in stockpiling myself and pretty much stick with just vinyl, tape or digital files with a small collection of things I can't bear to dump or occasionally picking up something unavailable otherwise, but CDs eventually becoming quite collectible wouldn't surprise me one little bit.

 

[jaetee]

I may well be way off, but I honestly think that a few years down the road you're going to see CDs as collectibles come back. Like 'em or not, and frankly I prefer vinyl and dumped all my CDs a few years back with no intention to rebuild, they were the last physical format to be distributed on a mass scale that people connected with where sound quality was at least ostensibly a driving factor to their development. A whole generation grew up with them as the ultimate medium and while you can get the same sound with lossless files and various competing and never really getting critical mass high res solutions, the CD was a physical thing, which is necessary for a collectible market. And people like to collect things, often it is not so much about the individual objects but people want physical product and music lovers like to collect physical things. I tend to think there is every chance that we are now in the great CD dump that people will be sorry about in a decade when they try to rebuild what was dumped for pennies, much the way you saw collections of vinyl vanish for practically nothing only to come back at 5 times the price as collectibles. And yes, for CDs the condition and the fact that most people treated them like crap will similarly be important. I'm not really interested in stockpiling myself and pretty much stick with just vinyl, tape or digital files with a small collection of things I can't bear to dump or occasionally picking up something unavailable otherwise, but CDs eventually becoming quite collectible wouldn't surprise me one little bit.

I completely agree with everything you said... (except the part about maybe being way off...)

 

[Northwinds]

I may well be way off, but I honestly think that a few years down the road you're going to see CDs as collectibles come back. Like 'em or not, and frankly I prefer vinyl and dumped all my CDs a few years back with no intention to rebuild, they were the last physical format to be distributed on a mass scale that people connected with where sound quality was at least ostensibly a driving factor to their development. A whole generation grew up with them as the ultimate medium and while you can get the same sound with lossless files and various competing and never really getting critical mass high res solutions, the CD was a physical thing, which is necessary for a collectible market. And people like to collect things, often it is not so much about the individual objects but people want physical product and music lovers like to collect physical things. I tend to think there is every chance that we are now in the great CD dump that people will be sorry about in a decade when they try to rebuild what was dumped for pennies, much the way you saw collections of vinyl vanish for practically nothing only to come back at 5 times the price as collectibles. And yes, for CDs the condition and the fact that most people treated them like crap will similarly be important. I'm not really interested in stockpiling myself and pretty much stick with just vinyl, tape or digital files with a small collection of things I can't bear to dump or occasionally picking up something unavailable otherwise, but CDs eventually becoming quite collectible wouldn't surprise me one little bit.

Anything is possible in the collectible market. I got huge money for my cassette collection but all were Heavy Metal titles. The gentleman that bought them has something called the Heavy Metal Museum

I have a crapload of CD's I culled from my collection that I want to move very soon. The wife see's the box on the floor and is getting antsy for them to disappear LOL

I have sold many silver pressed CD boots for good money, never had much luck with current stuff except for early Heavy Metal titles but as you say, that could change in the next decade. Probably see old CD players go up in price to. I have some pretty fancy Sony's still, a couple Denon's and maybe a few others. I am still waiting to move some cassette decks I have also, no one seems to want cassette decks unless they are uber highend

 

[BubbaH]

I also think we may see a CD revival at some point. I also believe we are in the big CD dump era as well. I somewhat capitalized on the vinyl dump back when I was young and not very knowledgeable. Missed out on the big cassette dump as I was too into CD's. You sure can find a lot of CD's for really low prices these days.

What kind of cassette decks you got up for sale?

 

[BlazeES]

The two main record stores we frequent (Amoeba and Rasputin's in Berkeley..) are huge stores. Lots of people walking in and then walking out with piles of vinyl & CD's. They are both chains with stores located all over the Bay Area and we've visited most their stores which are all sizable [think Tower Records in terms of square footage..]. Rasputin's has a huge second floor (or basement) solely dedicated to vinyl + quite a bit of it upstairs as well. But the CD shelves are massive too. I know there's this push to go all digital download for many of the Millennials, but physical media seems to be thriving where I live. The mini-Me is collecting all sorts of stuff, trying to be a complete-ist for everything Pink Floyd in fact, and digital downloads are a part of his musical life but he already understands the difference between poorly ripped digital, well mastered CD sound and the glory of vinyl at the ripe old age of 15. The downfall of CD's is something I just don't see happening at any wild clip TBH.

 

[Elite-ist]

So many great observations posted. Dave, I agree with your comments.

Perhaps, two years ago I unloaded many of my pre-recorded cassettes, with attaché-style portable cases. Half of what I judged superfluous went to my best friend and the other half went to my youngest son. If I had the titles in vinyl or CD, or I was just plain disinterested in the music, I unloaded it for free. Curious though, as I had unloaded a whole bunch of pre-recorded tapes on CC, I began collecting stuff on pre-recorded cassette which I didn't have in any other format. And I collected a lot of mix tapes recorded on some nice-to-excellent quality tapes. I have two mix tapes recorded on TDK MA-XGs, both Pink Floyd albums! These were the first of these premium Type IV tapes I had ever come across. However, the recordings weren't that well done.

I have a small collection of my original vinyl I bought in the 70's to 80's. I keep that particular grouping separate from the rest of my records. Everything after that, I bought second-hand, or had gifted to me, or I have bought brand new in the past three years.

I have a "Goldmine Record & Prices Guide" which I sometimes refer to for valuations. I haven't thought of referring to the internet for current prices. I have a premium Japanese pressing of "Talking Heads '77" which is worth over $100. I haven't looked over the rest of my vinyl to estimate the value, as I didn't make it my objective to collect valuable records, only ones I would like to play.

Nando.

 

[Northwinds]

Cool Nando. I think we still have 4-5 tape cases full of factory recorded tapes (non Heavy Metal), have not looked at them in years

I even still have a few sealed ones on the shelf next to me from a huge DJ collection I scored years ago, I bought mostly records but got these also and a few promo CD's

Grateful Dead - s/t (Warner Bros)
Peter Frampton - Comes Alive! (A&M)
AC/DC - The Razors Edge (Atlantic)
Rush - Hemispheres (Mercury)
Rush - Permenent Waves (Mercury)
Don Henley - The End of Innocence (Geffen)

Probably should move these on soon as I don't have the heart to open them

 

[Elite-ist]

Ron: Ah, you do have a few boxes of tapes gathering dust! Those are great titles on CD! I don't have one unsealed CD. But, I do have a few LPs which are still sealed.

Going back to the 70's through early 90's, I spent plenty of hours listening to pre-recorded cassettes in my car. That's why I had amassed about 300-400 titles in CC. As new titles were being released on cassette, I bought them. My X-brother-in-law bought the new releases in records instead, then immediately recorded his albums to cassette. Now, that was a better idea, wasn't it. As I recall, there were better deals for new releases in vinyl than there were for tapes. All the tapes I bought, I enclosed the paper receipt within the J-card.

I noted in another thread about your Pioneer PL-550. I had a PL-570 up until this spring.

Nando.

 

[Northwinds]

Just looked in the cabinet and there is about 3 cases full and probably another kicking around elsewhere

Did find another sealed cassette: America - History/America's Greatest Hits (Warner Bros)

Love the old Pioneer biggun's! The 570 is the automatic version of the 550 right? Little different setup

 

[BubbaH]

When HMV first started carrying vinyl here, they were selling titles at 2 for 25. I was buying up lots of stuff. Most of it re issues. I still have quite a few that have yet to be opened. Ill get to them at some point.