How many plays can you get out of a good record?

I have used Last Record Preservative since it was introduced almost forty years ago. My LP's are still in like-new condition, some of them bought new and now fifty-five years old. I have also always used the best record cleaners available at any given time.

My LP's and my drum collection (all vintage, some of them dating back to the late-1920's).are my most-prized possessions. Girlfriends and wives come and go, but records (and CD's) and musical instruments are forever. ;-)

Now we have the relatively low cost technology to make transparent digital copies off vinyl re-play.  Someone should do this with some newly acquired high quality LPs, wait 10-20 years, keep track of the use, and then play the vinyl and compare it to how it sounded 10-20 years prior.  That is the only way to make a subjective judgement.  I suppose you could shrink the time element by playing the same LP over and over again and compare digital recordings done before vs after. There may be formal studies where a test LP with test tones is played repeatedly, so as to detect loss of HF or bass frequencies.  I don't have a good digital recorder, even if I cared about this issue.

A lifetime for sure. After that it's out of my hands.

The trick is to have so many records that you can't play any single copy too often.

Perspective is a funny thing. Time was, I would have cringed at 1.8 gram tracking.