staff@slashgear.com (David Bixenspan)
2024-04-08 12:15:12
www.slashgear.com
If you’re still buying CDs, outside of very specific outliers like BOOKOFF in New York City, you’re not likely to find stores that will buy them in bulk if you want to get rid of them. Some limited editions might be of particular interest, but you’ll probably need to sell them online, usually piecemeal. With vinyl records, though, record stores are constantly buying large collections to absorb into their inventory. You might not necessarily get what you paid for them, but finding a buyer is trivial unless you’re trying to offload a collection of particularly common and undesirable records.
This can also extend to getting resale value out of individual releases. As noted earlier, a lot of newer vinyl releases are from specialty reissue labels. These require licensing the titles individually from the rights holder, and much of the time, once they’re gone, they’re gone. Occasional big sellers might be worth keeping in print, but those are outliers. If a particular reissue becomes a big favorite, its value can skyrocket on the secondhand market.
Case in point: Sea Change, Beck’s 2002 album, got the deluxe treatment from Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab in 2010, and according to Michael Fremer’s contemporaneous review, it sounds amazing. Within a few years, the $39.99 retail reissue sold out, and now? As of this writing, the most recent eBay sale went for over $300, while the dozen Discogs listings for it start at around $200. Collectibles are volatile, but at least vinyl is collectible.