It has been an interesting couple of days. While it's just a portion of my collection, I decided to start entering some of my vinyl in Discogs. When you get to a rather *cough* seasoned age, a trip to a record store in person or online sometimes results in a duplicate purchase. That and I was curious to see which records were worth anything.
For now, I only worked on one section of vinyl. At the moment, I have the vinyl split into 180g and audiophile pressings, followed by jazz, classical, pop/rock, and instrumental/pop vocal. I started with the 180g/audiophile section, as most of the titles have barcodes.
I had a few surprises in my collection, and also found a few ways to search for records when there was no barcode on the jacket or shrinkwrap, or in rare cases had a barcode that wouldn't scan.
Searching
The Discogs app on a smartphone is a good way to enter a lot of titles in bulk, as the app should work well with many of the newer phones and the camera can work as your barcode scanner. I had a few misses with the scanner, but rescanning with different lighting, or at a different angle to remove glare, would usually make it work. If you find the wrong item is scanned, compare the actual UPC number scanned to the number below the barcode on the record. If it doesn't match, you've had a bad scan, and should retry it.
Barring that, if you're cataloging vinyl that has no barcode, that can be a lot of frustrating typing on a smartphone. I have a couple of tablets--one has an accessory keyboard, and I have another small Bluetooth keyboard I can use with another. It helps if you can pull a chair up near your collection, rather than carrying armloads of records back to a computer.
Searching can be as easy as you want to make it. I found the Discogs search engine to work quite well. In may cases, I could search for a catalog number only, and get the proper result. "MFSL-1-006", "APP 1956", "SPJ-4720", etc., will often get the right results. If the results are too ambiguous, include the label name. You can also get creative. Searching "mobile Jarreau" will bring up Al Jarreau's All Fly Home on Mobile Fidelity.
As with any Discogs search, if you are presented with multiple choices, read through to the individual items to find which one is correct (release year, label, black or colored vinyl, numbered or not, LP playback speed, etc. are your clues). Add the correct one to your collection and, if you have duplicate copies, enter those as well--Discogs let you add as many as you want.
The real work comes when I work on the rest of the collection, as many predate barcodes.
How did I do?
When I've ordered via Discogs, I have often had the items in the order entered in my collection. So in addition to those, adding in my efforts from the past two days has resulted in 387 items entered in my Discogs collection.
The thing that really surprised me were the values of some of the records, both on the high and low side. I'll share a few examples here.
Is it worth it to buy a special edition release from a band's web site? Apparently so. I had ordered The Mavericks title En Español a few years ago--there was a limited run of a couple hundred copies in black/blue/pink splatter vinyl, with the jacket signed by the four primary members. To say I was surprised by the the average ($135) and high ($200) prices was an understatement.
Audiophile releases are often expected to be worth more as they are pressed in low numbers. I had expected the Charlie Brown Christmas LP to be worth a little more, but was totally surprised by this:
I bought it new, when it was in print, probably for around $35. Note that this is a newer Analogue Productions pressing that was mastered by Kevin Gray; the previous Hoffman/Gray pressing at 45 RPM I believe has an average over $250 now. So, an impressive value on this one. (And I can easily say mine is the best copy I've ever heard, short of a needle drop of the 45 RPM version.)
Antonio Carlos Jobim was worth a few bucks also.
Another surprise, as I probably didn't pay more than $40 for this new, as the previous owner claimed it had a slight tick here and there. (With the SugarCube doing its magic, there are no ticks at all. No fleas, either.) This release came via the ORG label (Original Recordings Group), and they do exemplary work on their releases.
And the A&M-distributed CTI release Wave didn't do so bad either. Current figures are $25/$50/$86 (low, average, high) for the Audio Master Plus half-speed mastered version, which is the definitive version in my collection. Tide was only slightly less. These were both a surprise.
Other Audio Master Plus titles did not fare so well--Herbie Mann's Glory of Love and the K & J.J. Israel did not have much value to them.
Another ORG 45 RPM title, Diana Krall's The Look of Love, fetches $75/$119/$141.
Some regular release surprises were in store also. Many things Steely Dan and Donald Fagen can fetch extra bucks, but Morph The Cat surprised me. It's a 2-LP set, and I don't think I paid over $40 for it.
The follow-up album Sunken Condos only tallies $38/$114/$206, which is still fairly good for a standard release.
Peter Gabriel's So, in its 45 RPM 2-LP version, fetches $75/$118/$184. Others in his 45 RPM series did not change much beyond their original cost.
The numbers for two Pat Metheny albums surprised me quite a bit. Orchestrion from 2010 has fetched $54/$100/$154, as I believe it was a release from the EU and not as widely available as his albums that followed. (For instance, Kin (<-- -->) only gets $18/$34/$64.) These are both recent 180g pressings. An EU pressing of a standard 2-LP copy of his 1992 album Secret Story is a really big surprise--$87/$152/$312. I got this one free--a pal of mine sent this to me since it had a lot of clicks and pops throughout. But the background noise is very low, and the SugarCube once again saves the day and it plays like a new record.
Mobile Fidelity titles are a mixed bag. There are two different eras of MoFi titles--one was their original run starting in the late 70s up to the early 80s. They continued under new series from the 90s to the present day. Of the early MoFi titles, a few fetch some decent money.
Styx: The Grand Illusion -- $45/$72/$163, with 20 for sale from $25.
Supertramp: Crime of the Century -- $29, $57, $175, with 66 for sale from $5.
Steely Dan: Katy Lied -- $40, $72, $108, with 37 for sale from $46. (A very muffled mastering.)
Steely Dan: Aja -- $19, $70, $200, with 77 for sale from $34. (This one sounds wonky; please don't seek it out.)
Brasil '66: Herb Alpert Presents -- $24/$125/$300, with 6 for sale from $80.
Nat King Cole Sings/George Shearing Plays -- $32/$76/$287, with 14 for sale from $32.
In those classic MoFi titles, you can also find a handful of bargains, with many under $20. Joe Sample's Rainbow Seeker, Gino Vannelli's Powerful People, Pablo Cruise's A Place in the Sun, John Klemmer's Touch, and others tend to sell at lower prices. For just a few dollars more you can get George Benson's Breezin', and even the 2-LP Neil Diamond Hot August Night for $40-$45 average, which is about the cost of a new 2-LP set today (and it's a good-sounding record).
Current-era MoFi titles tend to hold their original value, with some harder-to-find titles drifting north of $50 now.
Surprising to me were the Nautilus and Super Disk reissues, which were also under $20 average. Spyro Gyra's Morning Dance, Jean-Luc Ponty's Cosmic Messenger, Doobie Brothers' Minute by Minute, Gino Vannelli's Brother to Brother, and the real embarrassment was the Dave Grusin Discovered Again! direct-to-disc title from Sheffield Labs. (Those were high dollar back in the 70s and early 80s...today the range is $1/$17/$80, with 46 available from $1. Killer deal for a fantastic sounding record with an all-star group backing him.)
The final record with a high value, which is actually a little lower than I though, is the rare 1953 10-inch LP called Moondog And His Friends. When I found it in the mid 2000s for $75, I had scored a bargain, as other copies were typically selling for $150 or more. Today?
It has seen both a vinyl and CD release in recent years, but they are of poor quality, sourced from a needle drop of this record. That leaves the original with lingering demand.
Do these prices mean much to me? Not in the grand scheme of things. It does make me exercise a bit of care with a formerly $35-ish record is now selling for a median price of $200. The main thing is, they are records I bought to play, not to collect for the sake of collecting or investing, or to worry about selling in the future.
It will be interesting to see how this all evolves as I attempt to catalog the rest of the vinyl. I will not be bothering with the CDs at the moment, as they are all in storage. But I eventually will, as I need to downsize quite a bit and it will be helpful to have these cataloged and ready to sell.
So far this has been an interesting exercise, and having a list of my collection at my fingertips when I'm out on a record crawl will be a big help. I'll update this as I go further through the collection in the coming weeks, if I come across anything of interest.
If you have cataloged your collection on Discogs, or are considering doing so, let us know in the comments!
For now, I only worked on one section of vinyl. At the moment, I have the vinyl split into 180g and audiophile pressings, followed by jazz, classical, pop/rock, and instrumental/pop vocal. I started with the 180g/audiophile section, as most of the titles have barcodes.
I had a few surprises in my collection, and also found a few ways to search for records when there was no barcode on the jacket or shrinkwrap, or in rare cases had a barcode that wouldn't scan.
Searching
The Discogs app on a smartphone is a good way to enter a lot of titles in bulk, as the app should work well with many of the newer phones and the camera can work as your barcode scanner. I had a few misses with the scanner, but rescanning with different lighting, or at a different angle to remove glare, would usually make it work. If you find the wrong item is scanned, compare the actual UPC number scanned to the number below the barcode on the record. If it doesn't match, you've had a bad scan, and should retry it.
Barring that, if you're cataloging vinyl that has no barcode, that can be a lot of frustrating typing on a smartphone. I have a couple of tablets--one has an accessory keyboard, and I have another small Bluetooth keyboard I can use with another. It helps if you can pull a chair up near your collection, rather than carrying armloads of records back to a computer.
Searching can be as easy as you want to make it. I found the Discogs search engine to work quite well. In may cases, I could search for a catalog number only, and get the proper result. "MFSL-1-006", "APP 1956", "SPJ-4720", etc., will often get the right results. If the results are too ambiguous, include the label name. You can also get creative. Searching "mobile Jarreau" will bring up Al Jarreau's All Fly Home on Mobile Fidelity.
As with any Discogs search, if you are presented with multiple choices, read through to the individual items to find which one is correct (release year, label, black or colored vinyl, numbered or not, LP playback speed, etc. are your clues). Add the correct one to your collection and, if you have duplicate copies, enter those as well--Discogs let you add as many as you want.
The real work comes when I work on the rest of the collection, as many predate barcodes.
How did I do?
When I've ordered via Discogs, I have often had the items in the order entered in my collection. So in addition to those, adding in my efforts from the past two days has resulted in 387 items entered in my Discogs collection.
The thing that really surprised me were the values of some of the records, both on the high and low side. I'll share a few examples here.
Is it worth it to buy a special edition release from a band's web site? Apparently so. I had ordered The Mavericks title En Español a few years ago--there was a limited run of a couple hundred copies in black/blue/pink splatter vinyl, with the jacket signed by the four primary members. To say I was surprised by the the average ($135) and high ($200) prices was an understatement.
Audiophile releases are often expected to be worth more as they are pressed in low numbers. I had expected the Charlie Brown Christmas LP to be worth a little more, but was totally surprised by this:
I bought it new, when it was in print, probably for around $35. Note that this is a newer Analogue Productions pressing that was mastered by Kevin Gray; the previous Hoffman/Gray pressing at 45 RPM I believe has an average over $250 now. So, an impressive value on this one. (And I can easily say mine is the best copy I've ever heard, short of a needle drop of the 45 RPM version.)
Antonio Carlos Jobim was worth a few bucks also.
Another surprise, as I probably didn't pay more than $40 for this new, as the previous owner claimed it had a slight tick here and there. (With the SugarCube doing its magic, there are no ticks at all. No fleas, either.) This release came via the ORG label (Original Recordings Group), and they do exemplary work on their releases.
And the A&M-distributed CTI release Wave didn't do so bad either. Current figures are $25/$50/$86 (low, average, high) for the Audio Master Plus half-speed mastered version, which is the definitive version in my collection. Tide was only slightly less. These were both a surprise.
Other Audio Master Plus titles did not fare so well--Herbie Mann's Glory of Love and the K & J.J. Israel did not have much value to them.
Another ORG 45 RPM title, Diana Krall's The Look of Love, fetches $75/$119/$141.
Some regular release surprises were in store also. Many things Steely Dan and Donald Fagen can fetch extra bucks, but Morph The Cat surprised me. It's a 2-LP set, and I don't think I paid over $40 for it.
The follow-up album Sunken Condos only tallies $38/$114/$206, which is still fairly good for a standard release.
Peter Gabriel's So, in its 45 RPM 2-LP version, fetches $75/$118/$184. Others in his 45 RPM series did not change much beyond their original cost.
The numbers for two Pat Metheny albums surprised me quite a bit. Orchestrion from 2010 has fetched $54/$100/$154, as I believe it was a release from the EU and not as widely available as his albums that followed. (For instance, Kin (<-- -->) only gets $18/$34/$64.) These are both recent 180g pressings. An EU pressing of a standard 2-LP copy of his 1992 album Secret Story is a really big surprise--$87/$152/$312. I got this one free--a pal of mine sent this to me since it had a lot of clicks and pops throughout. But the background noise is very low, and the SugarCube once again saves the day and it plays like a new record.
Mobile Fidelity titles are a mixed bag. There are two different eras of MoFi titles--one was their original run starting in the late 70s up to the early 80s. They continued under new series from the 90s to the present day. Of the early MoFi titles, a few fetch some decent money.
Styx: The Grand Illusion -- $45/$72/$163, with 20 for sale from $25.
Supertramp: Crime of the Century -- $29, $57, $175, with 66 for sale from $5.
Steely Dan: Katy Lied -- $40, $72, $108, with 37 for sale from $46. (A very muffled mastering.)
Steely Dan: Aja -- $19, $70, $200, with 77 for sale from $34. (This one sounds wonky; please don't seek it out.)
Brasil '66: Herb Alpert Presents -- $24/$125/$300, with 6 for sale from $80.
Nat King Cole Sings/George Shearing Plays -- $32/$76/$287, with 14 for sale from $32.
In those classic MoFi titles, you can also find a handful of bargains, with many under $20. Joe Sample's Rainbow Seeker, Gino Vannelli's Powerful People, Pablo Cruise's A Place in the Sun, John Klemmer's Touch, and others tend to sell at lower prices. For just a few dollars more you can get George Benson's Breezin', and even the 2-LP Neil Diamond Hot August Night for $40-$45 average, which is about the cost of a new 2-LP set today (and it's a good-sounding record).
Current-era MoFi titles tend to hold their original value, with some harder-to-find titles drifting north of $50 now.
Surprising to me were the Nautilus and Super Disk reissues, which were also under $20 average. Spyro Gyra's Morning Dance, Jean-Luc Ponty's Cosmic Messenger, Doobie Brothers' Minute by Minute, Gino Vannelli's Brother to Brother, and the real embarrassment was the Dave Grusin Discovered Again! direct-to-disc title from Sheffield Labs. (Those were high dollar back in the 70s and early 80s...today the range is $1/$17/$80, with 46 available from $1. Killer deal for a fantastic sounding record with an all-star group backing him.)
The final record with a high value, which is actually a little lower than I though, is the rare 1953 10-inch LP called Moondog And His Friends. When I found it in the mid 2000s for $75, I had scored a bargain, as other copies were typically selling for $150 or more. Today?
It has seen both a vinyl and CD release in recent years, but they are of poor quality, sourced from a needle drop of this record. That leaves the original with lingering demand.
Do these prices mean much to me? Not in the grand scheme of things. It does make me exercise a bit of care with a formerly $35-ish record is now selling for a median price of $200. The main thing is, they are records I bought to play, not to collect for the sake of collecting or investing, or to worry about selling in the future.
It will be interesting to see how this all evolves as I attempt to catalog the rest of the vinyl. I will not be bothering with the CDs at the moment, as they are all in storage. But I eventually will, as I need to downsize quite a bit and it will be helpful to have these cataloged and ready to sell.
So far this has been an interesting exercise, and having a list of my collection at my fingertips when I'm out on a record crawl will be a big help. I'll update this as I go further through the collection in the coming weeks, if I come across anything of interest.
If you have cataloged your collection on Discogs, or are considering doing so, let us know in the comments!
. I remember an earlier thread about how everyone organizes their analog and /or digital formats ie. alphabetically, time order, etc but I think if I have a general idea of where the CD or vinyl is, it may be more motivating for me to look at my collection on Discogs and maybe inspire me to listen to something I haven't heard in a while, which is the beauty of collecting for me.