If you’re reading this, chances are that you’ve got at least a passing interest in making some extra money by selling your old records. Preferably a LOT of extra money.
The good news is that it is entirely possible to make quite a bit of cash selling valuable old records to collectors around the world. Doing that quickly and easily is another matter, but we’ll save that for another post. Today, I want to address the most important factor in determining whether you’re likely to make any money off your record collection, namely: are your old records worth anything?
Your odds of a huge payout
Since the American record industry graduated from the old, fragile, tinny-sounding shellac records of the early 20th century, and into the 33 and 45 RPM records we remember from about 1950 on, approximately six billion — yes, billion with a “B” — vinyl discs were pressed and sold in the US alone. In 2020, somewhere between 10 and 30 million used records changed hands among collectors. So, using some very rough math, we can see that between one-quarter to one-half of one percent of all the records ever manufactured are still sufficiently desirable to be bought and sold in the collector’s record marketplace. Put another way: if you have a pile of 300 old records, selected at random from across the history of American vinyl record-making, about one of them will be of interest to a collector.
Luckily for you, though, there are no “random” piles of records in anybody’s basement. Instead, we have collections that were built by people with very specific preferences and tastes. So if your old uncle Morty was a huge 1950s hard bop jazz fan with lots of extra spending money — or if great-aunt Joan was a radio station programmer in the 60s who kept all her promo discs from labels who were trying to get their artists on the air — or if you just happened to inherit a deep collection of high-quality, hard-to-find, in-demand music of any genre — you’re in luck!
But that raises a number of tough questions: how do you know which records are “hard to find”? Which genres of music are “in demand”? And what’s the best way to determine if your records are of sufficient quality — both in terms of the music itself and the actual condition of your records — to interest a collector?
The Internet doesn’t help much
The internet isn’t much help in this area. You’ll find plenty of dealers telling you what genres they buy, but not seeing a particular musical style on a dealer’s list doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not collectable. And it drives me crazy when I see dealers suggesting that entire genres and artist catalogs (e.g., “old blues,” or “Elvis”) are always desirable, while others (“old jazz,” “disco”) are not. That’s just nonsense — they only say those things because they want to know ahead of time if you’re likely to have any of the records they specialize in.
One reasonably efficient way to find out if specific records are worth anything is to search “sold” listings for those records on eBay. That’ll tell you if a copy of your album has ever sold on eBay in the last three months, and for how much. But there are gotchas to that method: most of the time, the records that sit at the top of the collectibility scale don’t get sold on eBay — so searching for them this way can lead you to discard the very records that ought to get you your biggest payoff! And the higher up the collectibility scale you go, the more a wide range of additional, super-obscure details come into play: what pressing plant was used to manufacture the record? Is the record vinyl or styrene? Old label logo or new? All these things can have a significant impact on the value of your record, and the list of variables is long.
The easiest way is usually the best way
In the end, what tends to happen to do-it-yourselfers is that they miss many of their most lucrative sales opportunities, and then they burn out on all the work involved with selling the lesser discs they find on their own. (See “What’s the Best Way To Sell Your Old Records” for more on this.). The easiest way to find out if your records are worth anything is to show them to a reputable, trustworthy buyer. Of course, doing so implies that you intend to sell them to your buyer if you agree on a price. The good news is that selling in this fashion will probably result in a larger total cash payout for you than you could ever get on your own. A reputable buyer will unlock value you didn’t even know you had.