Selling your vinyl could bring you the needed cash to buy a new piece of gear, allow you to attend the next big party or provide for your livelihood.

Although pricing vinyl is a mixture of expertise and personal opinion, vinyl has a unique way of fluctuating in price depending on the rarity, condition and sentimental value. To many DJs, the day will come when you simply do not have the space to keep all of your collection. Before you unload your collection onto a record shop or sell them online, you should know the baseline to what your vinyl is worth.

Using online price guides, books and this guide, you should find a middle ground on the value of your vinyl.

Note: the prices reflected in this guide does not need to match your own, it can be hard to part with that old acid house tune from ’88 but at least knowing the basics should help you avoid getting jipped.

Before you go any further, I suggest you take a look at BDJ’s other post: The Vinyl Record Grading Guide.

Foreword

To understand vinyl DJing means to understand the format you’ve selected as your main media of choice. Although many local record shops are closing down, the price for vinyl continues to fluctuate. You’ll run into an assortment of people: collectors, fellow DJs, vinyl enthusiasts, shop owners and many others interested.

I know how personal vinyl feels at times, I get quite cranky when people lazily browse through my collection without placing them back into their sleeves. There’s a different kind of mentality for those who actively seek out this format, almost a collective. Rambling aside, if you are too worked up to part with your vinyl – don’t do it.

Many great DJs have built immense collections in their day only to sell it all for new formats. You will see thousands of comments across the net where DJs regret giving up their collection. In darker times, collections were even dumped into dumpsters due to lack of market and space, do you want that to happen to your collection?

As I mentioned before, there is generally 3 variable to pricing vinyl:

1. Rarity
2. Condition
3. Sentimental Value

Another factor you may want to consider is the market itself. If you are the only DJ on the block that has that brand new wax, you can bet that it will fetch a higher price than that shitty Black Eye Peas pressing you can find in Virgin Megastore.

Once you understand the people you will be dealing with, as well as your personal commitment, you will be able to accurately price your vinyl without feeling like you lost out afterward.

“Get on with it already!”

How to price your vinyl – and not get ripped off

The first thing you’ll want to remember when pricing your vinyl is that, regardless of what a book or website says, vinyl really depends on what you feel comfortable with and what people feel is a fair price.

Although many people reference the Goldmine Pricing Guide, you’ll quickly find out that local record shops won’t offer you the same prices because A. they need to turn a profit, and, B. the prices depend on the market value during the publication.

Let’s take a deeper look into these two things.

The reason why you won’t get a the same price you expected from a local record shop is that it would be infeasible, as a shop owner, to buy a piece of vinyl at collectors price only to mark it up and never sell it. There’s no way a record shop owner is going to give you full price because it doesn’t make the least bit sense for business. Unless you find personal dealers or the owner wants it for their personal collection, expect the local shops to cut the price of your vinyl between 50 – 75% of the “expected” price.

The market value plays another huge role in the value of your vinyl. Each day a rare single from that Disco star could be anywhere from $10 to $30, you never know. You see this all the time in every day items, once the word gets out that there is a scarcity of the pressing, the prices will shoot up. If the vinyl goes into a reprint, it could possibly go down. You have to expect that your vinyl won’t hold the same value the day before. Sure it could continue to raise in price over the years but it could also lower in price.

The best way to price your vinyl, as of now, would be to take a look around online to see what the going rate is – thank you Internet!

Here are a few places you could check the value of your vinyl records:

1. Ebay
2. Discogs
3. Amazon
4. Vinyl forums
5. Local record shops
6. Vinyl collector sites

Out of all of these, the two that I prefer are Discogs and Ebay.

Ebay

Ebay is a decent place to find the value of your vinyl records. Of course, you could also sell your vinyl on Ebay as well. Whenever you are doing a search for your vinyl, take a look at the current auctions and weigh in the amount of bids, starting price, number of auctions and the type of competition you’ll be facing.

A great tip for pricing vinyl on Ebay is to view completed auctions. You will need an account to view completed auctions but it provides a wealth of information on the final prices of auctions on what you are searching for.

Here’s a great formula to determine the value of your vinyl via Ebay:

20 Final Auction Prices divided by 20 equals the Average Price

This little formula will help you determine the average price. If this price seems too low for you don’t fret, it may change in the near future, just hold out until then.

There are a few cons about using Ebay as the main gateway of pricing and selling your vinyl:

1. People want everything as cheap as possible
2. People love to cheat each other

To touch on the worst part about pricing and selling vinyl on Ebay is that people want the lowest possible price, always. Although your vinyl could be worth $20, they want it for $1. Unless you want to deal with these people, I suggest the next site…

Discogs

Discogs is a vinyl lovers dream. You can literally find it all on Discogs: discographies, pricing, sales, great users and more.

Discogs is the best place to price your vinyl in my opinion. Because the site is set up with loads of information about the actual songs and albums, people generally know what they are talking about and who they are dealing with.

The Discogs marketplace is highly competitive. Unlike Ebay which people commonly undercut your pricing, Discog users tend to sit on their collection until it sells for the price they want. Because this price is stable, it makes Discogs the best place to price your own.

Much like the Ebay formula, just take the a handful of pricing and divided it by the amount, this should give you a fairly accurate portrayal of the prices real people are offering, not what a dated book says.

Amazon

Although I don’t completely recommend it, Amazon can also be a decent place to find the price of your vinyl records. Although, as a DJ, you may have a massive amount of pressings which Amazon does not list, you’ll still be able to find quite a bit.

The Amazon marketplace is great for people selling vinyl because you never feel rushed. Unlike Ebay that has a definitive end date to your auctions, your vinyl on Amazon stays listed until it is sold. In a way like Discogs, people will set fair prices for their vinyl without trying to get a quick buck. You will however run into people that try to undercut you, just a heads up.

Vinyl Forums

What better way to get a price for your vinyl than on forums where collectors flock to actively discuss their recent finds and about vinyl in general.

You’ll run into some very intelligent and passionate people on vinyl forums. Because this is often their livelihood or hobby, vinyl forum users spend an ungodly amount of time building their knowledge of music and formats. These forum users, when so ingrained into the scene, will be able to give you fair pricing based on what they’ve seen over the years and things they’ve heard – as long as you ask them nicely.

Local Vinyl Shops

Local vinyl shops is one of my favorite ways to get a good idea of the price of your vinyl. As noted before, owners will not always give you the best deals for your vinyl but you can still use this information in determining your own.

Getting to know the people that run the shop as well as the people that visit will open up dialog about pricing and how to sell your vinyl. The kid that’s browsing the Happy Hardcore most likely knows the rarity of your HH tracks, talk to them a bit to get a feel on how rare your vinyl is, who knows you may be able to sell it to them.

Vinyl Collector Sites

Finally, there are quite a few websites that offer free price quotes as well as connections to sell your vinyl to other enthusiasts.

These websites may or may not take a cut of the sale but if you want a fair price while gaining more knowledge about what you have, vinyl collector sites are a great hub for pricing your vinyl.

Final Input

DJs have many tough choices when dealing with their vinyl collections. On one hand you have to continue to buy new vinyl for the mixes you spin while on the other you have to keep a balance of your collection. The best way to think about selling your vinyl is that you’ll be raising funds to buy new stuff to play for your crowd.

As long as you take the extra time to gain an understand of the value of your vinyl, you should feel like you’ve ended with a bad deal. If the wax is so important to you, just keep it.

For those interested in selling vinyl as a business, this information is equally important so your shop doesn’t close down from lack of sales or not being able to push your product due to extreme pricing.

After time, you’ll be able to determine the price of your vinyl without having to do an immense amount of research.

Wither its for your livelihood, to buy new wax, funds to party or to clean out your collection, accurately pricing your vinyl using this guide is your best bet to prevent getting ripped off.

How do you determine the price of your vinyl? Do you use any of these methods or have some other way? Share your experiences with a comment below.