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How much do large Vinyl collections go for these days?

What is vinyl pricing doing these days? Is good used vinyl appreciating or depreciating?

I have a collection of about 1700 Jazz LP's. 95%+ are VG+ or better (I bought them that way and clean records every time on a Loricraft)

About 500 are earlier (50's, 60's) issues like Blue note w42, NY USA, a few Lex Ave, Bergenfield Prestige, Columbia, Savoy, Verve, Riverside, Atlantic etc.

The rest are OJC reissues, and other later good jazz labels like Enja, Soul Note, Inner City Mo fi etc.

Many were purchased from big jazz collections on Ebay over the years. About 20% were purchased new and have seen only a few plays (given there are so many). The rest were mostly purchased from the Jazz Record Center in NYC and anyone who knows them is well acquainted with the quality of their records.

I estimate I paid about 50K in total for these, so an average of $30. The best stuff was $100 or so on Ebay. The OJC's were $8 years ago new from Acoustic Sounds. Would you hold or sell?

I know the answer is "it depends" but any other insights are appreciated.


jyprez
miner42
709 posts
 
I recently sold by late brother-in-laws collection to a record store.  1326 LPs for $3000.  Most were VG+ condition (he played once and recorded to cassette).
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
Always sell to the end user.

sbank's avatar
sbank
3,382 posts
 
You frame the question "hold or sell" as if you have a liquid commodity that is sold as easily as a NYSE holding. Records are more like penny stocks. If you want retail value, you have to sell individually, investing time and energy and sometimes not finding a buyer at all. 

If you sell the collection to a record store they will offer you about 20% of what they expect to get for it over time. If you want to sell retail online to get close retail, consider about a half hour of your time for each album to be photographed, listed, packed, shipped. Consider ~$1 for packing materials each, and 10% or more selling/payment fees if you want to use eBay or similar large market. 
When I've evaluated collections to buy for purpose of reselling, I try to figure that I can clear $20/hour of my labor and if the collection allows that after expenses I will buy it. Many who inherit or decide to sell overvalue their collections because of their emotional attachments and the waking up process often takes a while. With classical and especially opera, the values are less and trending quickly towards zero. Cheers,
Spencer
jyprez's avatar
jyprez OP
241 posts
 

Thanks, Spencer. I realize selling LP's is not like selling stocks on my Fidelity account. The 20% you suggest is a number that i think is in the range of reasonable.

Thanks to those who suggested Discogs. I was not aware of this site before. I tried a few LP's and it works pretty well.

 I think the really labor intensive thing about selling LP's would be to show images of your actual LP''s, covers etc. If you could just list with the images provided on Discogs, and then describe any differences (e.g. "there are some stamps from the radio station on the back of the cover or the owner signed their name or slight wear and water damage on one side etc.....") then this would work. The advantage of Ebay, of course, is you are selling to a very big, international market and I often found myself bidding against very deep pocket collectors from Asia etc. who were willing to pay big (bigger) bucks than I could rationalize (supply vs. demand at work). I don't know how deep the Discogs market is. 

lloydc's avatar
lloydc
762 posts
 

I sold my opera collection, about 800 near mint records, for $75. The alternative was to donate them to the local opera.

In other words, ime, opera records have almost no value. 

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