46

IN WHICH… I WONDER HOW TO MAKE MONEY BY SELLING VINYL

On 13 June 2018 my postman delivered an LP I’d bought online from a Discogs seller just two days earlier. The speed with which it arrived was impressive. But the package was almost undone already, and also had a worrying-looking crease towards the bottom. I’d bought it on the understanding that the condition of the record was ‘VG+’ and of the cover ‘VG’. Even the quickest of glances indicated that the rating for the cover was over-generous by definitely one, probably two, maybe even three grades. With a split along the top seam of the cover, a potential risk regularly associated with receiving records through the post, and two separately written names scrawled on the back, along with a few more ravages of time since its 1972 release, it definitely didn’t qualify as Very Good in my book. Not even Good-plus, really. If I’d seen it at a car boot sale I’d have offered maybe three quid for it, at a record fair, maximum a fiver, which is what it had been valued at by the person I’d bought it from. But of course, to get it, I’d had to pay postage and packing which came out at £4.50. I knew full well there is always an inherent risk in buying online and you should always expect a slightly less overwhelming item than described. But I was underwhelmed at best.

I wrote a personal message of explanation to the vinyl vendor explaining my thoughts whilst awarding him ‘neutral’ feedback as I don’t believe he was actively looking to short change me and I do know from experience how difficult it can sometimes be to grade an item without leaving room for dispute. He came back offering a £2 refund, while not actually admitting he’d been wrong. I wondered why he hadn’t priced it accurately from the start – particularly as before buying it I’d utilised the ‘make an offer’ facility on Discogs, but he hadn’t accepted it. I sent him a note: ‘I’m not looking for a refund, although the offer is appreciated. I would have paid the amount requested in any case, but just felt I should say that I honestly thought the cover grading wasn’t adequately explained. I’m sure you didn’t intentionally mean to mislead.’

The record itself was in decent enough condition, so at least I wasn’t upset about that. He isn’t the only one. I’ve frequently seen this happen on eBay, but there you do at least usually get to look at the cover yourself via a photograph, before deciding whether to buy. My own philosophy when selling on eBay is to be as accurate and fair as possible and if in doubt to underestimate fractionally. Here was a microcosm of the always possible disappointing experience and feeling you can get when buying online.

I think many collectors believe they are frequently hard done by when they buy second-hand records – but obviously retain the ultimate weapon of just not buying. But what happens when they decide to sell off some of their own surplus vinyl? How should they go about it without overvaluing their product, thus limiting severely their chances of ever selling the records, or, in contrast, feeling that they have to sell things dirt cheap in order to get any buyer response? Where is the middle ground?

Faced with the ‘time to downsize’ demand from my better half, I had decided that the only way I could buy into this concept seriously, would be to agree reluctantly to part with records when there was a financial incentive to do so. It is easy enough to get rid of some of the suspect items which every collector accrues over the years through buying stuff which was so cheap it was silly not to, or through buying when under the influence of different substances, or through having a future father-in-law who genuinely appeared to believe that a Bachelors’ LP and another by a military band would make appropriate Christmas presents for his hairy, psych-loving would-be son-in-law.

Once these candidates have been dispatched to the local charity shops you’re left with the ones which you haven’t played for many a long year, and, deep down, know that you never will. The Village People, Boney M, The Dooleys, The Nolans, might fit into this category. There are also those who, at first glance, would appear to qualify, but actually definitely do not. Class acts like KC & The Sunshine Band, George McCrae, Abba… even some Carpenters’ records. The obvious problem here is that those in the ‘keeping just in case’ class genuinely have virtually no resale value whatsoever. Try finding someone who will actually hand over significant hard cash for Donna Summer, Roger Whitaker or Mud discs. What many ‘novice’ record sellers fail to grasp is that, by and large, the more successful a record has been, the less its resale value will be, simply because there are so many of them out there now unloved and unwanted.

Let’s assume that, armed with a copy of the current Rare Record Price Guide, access to Amazon, eBay, Discogs, Popsike and any other publication or online site you feel may help you assess the ‘value’ of your records, you have identified a few discs which you are confident you could live without and are ready to flog them. Your mates will be either disinterested, or happy to rip you off, thus there is very little possibility of them paying you anywhere near what you feel they are worth. Which means you may decide to throw yourself on the tender mercies of the local record shop(s), should you be fortunate enough a) to live within comparatively easy reach of one, b) to know that it is there, and, c) brave enough to set foot inside!

Before you set off for the shop lugging a heavy bag or case full of unwanted vinyl, be aware that the record shop owner, although sure to be pleasant to you, is likely to have developed via years of practice a convincing technique which ensures that he or she is able to look at a record, admit that it is a desirable copy, yet somehow find a reason why it will be ‘the devil of a job’ to sell it on, because ‘their records were fetching huge money just a few months back but all of a sudden the bottom seems to have dropped out of that market’.

You may also have just read a story in the paper about the ‘thousands of pounds worth of records you could have sitting on your attic’. This will convince you your scratched old Beatles, Stones and Ken Dodd records are worth megabucks. Like a headline story in the Daily Mail in March 2019: ‘Given to charity shop, rare Beatles record worth £20k!’ You’re wrong. They’re almost certainly not. Not to you, anyway.

But you may still have a trump card or two to play with that carefully tended limited release edition, the unusually shaped, coloured vinyl obscurity, the quickly withdrawn commemorative disc, and that autographed Hendrix double album. These will swing it for you, you inwardly smirk. Sure enough, there’s an interest: ‘Now that one, the limited edition, I’ve known that go for plenty – but the market was recently flooded when a dozen of them turned up at a car boot sale – not so limited after all! That cut the value by over 50 per cent.’

The coloured vinyl – that must be a winner. Who can resist a turquoise-spattered A-side with contrasting velvet-feel vinyl on the B-side? Sadly, it appears, most people: ‘Coloured vinyl’s all well and good, but that means they’ve sacrificed the quality of reproduction – and what’s the point of coloured vinyl if no one can see it – unless you frame it and hang it on the wall, the colour is irrelevant, and if you do hang it on the blooming wall you can’t play it, can you?’

What about the one with the dead rock star’s signature on it? That your best friend who once went out with him gave you all those years ago when she emigrated. The one he’d handed her with the message, ‘Thanks for the hot date, love Jimi’ written on it? ‘Great, yeah. But can you prove you didn’t write that yourself? And, well, “Jimi” – Jimi who? Yes, it’s written on a Jimi Hendrix record and you might well say it was Jimi Hendrix who wrote it, but why should I take the risk that it might turn out to be a copy owned by Jimi Bloggs, who just signed it himself to impress his mates. Besides, it says “Test Pressing” on it and it doesn’t have the cover with the naked girls on it, and that all means it wasn’t a proper, released copy, so can’t be worth as much as one made once they’d got the pressing right.’

Finally, you may be made an offer. It will be at best a third of what you were anticipating and will be accompanied by much sighing and ‘you’re lucky I’m in a good mood’ remarks, as well as the occasional, ‘I could do you a bit better if you wanted to exchange for other records’ or ‘If only you hadn’t played them so much I could have offered twice as much’. By now, you will be feeling ground down and stressed, so distraught at the thought of dragging the records all the way back home again, that you’ll say, ‘If you make it another tenner you can have them’ – and before you’ve even finished the word ‘tenner’, you’ll feel the money pressed into your palm, and see the records disappearing behind the counter without having been able to discern the lightning movements of the owner, who is no longer acknowledging your presence.

You walk home, head down, carrying an empty bag and a few quid, trying to convince yourself you’re a consummate bargainer who has just screwed that tight-fisted dealer out of much more than (s)he was meaning to hand over, particularly when you insisted on at least 50 quid for the Hendrix signature album, which you’d never quite believed was real in any case.

You’re wrong. Again.

A week or so later, at the shops or in the pub, someone who knows you well, will say, ‘Oh, I was in a record shop the other day. You used to like Hendrix didn’t you? I saw a copy of his Electric Ladyland double album – yes, you know, the one which normally has all those naked women on the cover. This one apparently had his actual, authentic signature on it, but the records were in a plain white sleeve. You’d have to think that would knock the value down, wouldn’t you? It was displayed on the wall, but some old bloke asked to look at it, and noticed not only that the tracks weren’t printed on the record labels, but they just had “Test Pressing” marked on them. What’s more it was a mono copy. What good is that? Anyway, for some bizarre reason, it was marked up at £1250, which was obviously laughable. Yet this bloke haggled a bit and then agreed to buy it for a grand. I reckon you should go and check your copy out just in case – blimey if they sell for £1000 you ought to be able to get at least £500 for your copy…’

By the way, that ‘20 grand’ Beatles record. Yes, it was valuable but it went for under half the predicted amount – £9400. And that was before the auction house’s deductions.

A record shop owner on a Facebook group I belong to recently commented on where best to sell vinyl:

‘What people forget is the chore of selling a record collection: either going from record fair to record fair while only selling the best out of the collection; selling on eBay (not getting top prices perhaps if you don’t have a name as a seller already); selling on Discogs/Facebook (only a small per cent of the records you have will sell unless you are selling them cheap). Remember, when selling online you also have to factor the time to grade/list/research prices/communication with buyers/getting packing material/packing/paypal fees/go to the post office. Also, we as a shop pay half of our selling price for more in-demand records, and maybe a third for stuff that’s not so in demand but still sellable. And remember record shops have to pay tax/rent etc.’

One potential stumbling block when posting sold records is the packaging of same. I recently saw a rant from highly respected rock author and collector Richard Morton Jack, absolutely laying into the seller of an LP, who had not removed the disc from the cover and packed them alongside each other to avoid the earlier-mentioned phenomenon of split-sleeve-seam on arrival, where the disc moves during transit and cuts into one side of the cover. I empathise with RMJ but wonder what his advice is for people packing and sending sealed records?

If you don’t have a record shop nearby you may well be able to sell your records via the local newspaper – should you be fortunate enough to have one of those. I recently saw an ad on the ‘community’ board in a local supermarket: ‘RECORDS; Marc 07876 ******. Collector wants to buy LPs & 45s from 1950s, 60s, 70s: Pop, Rock, Soul, Jazz, Folk, Classical.’ I texted him asking how he would go about it. Would he visit? Would the seller visit him? Would he make an offer there and then? How would the seller know they weren’t being ripped off? Was he a dealer as well as a collector?

Optima magazine comes through our door every couple of weeks. In an April 2018 edition was an advert, under the heading ‘Articles Wanted’: Record & CD collections Bought For Cash; LPs/45s/CDs. Call Robin on 0208 *** ****. 07976 ******.’ I sent him a text with the same sort of questions.

The Harrow Times newspaper carried a similar appeal, again under an ‘Articles Wanted’ heading: ‘OLD VINYL RECORDS WANTED: Private collector looking for 60s/70s Singles & LPs. Beatles, Stones, etc. Prog/Psych especially. Also Rock CDs. 07969 *** ***.’

Marc the supermarket man replied within two minutes of receiving my text: ‘I sort the records and books for a couple of charities so hope I’m up to date on prices. I only collect records and am trying to build up my collection again after I lost the last one in my divorce. I only make an offer once I’ve seen the records.’ I replied, asking him what my ‘very good’ condition Elton John Captain Fantastic LP may be worth – and a Dire Straits album signed by all the band members in an effort to tease out some idea of how realistic/honest he would be. Again, a very speedy response: ‘I have the Captain Fantastic LP. It’s a great record but sold over a million copies and has only a low value today. The Dire Straits should be auctioned on the internet. I’d guess £50+ just because of the autographs.’

I felt this was a fair response and didn’t immediately suggest a conman at work, so I sent him a list of records that I would be happy to part with at the right price, including the likes of Camel, Alice Cooper, The Truth, Rick Wakeman, Frank Zappa, Jimmy Pursey, Siouxsie & The Banshees, from 1976-84. Back came the answer: ‘Thanks for the list, but a little late for me.’

‘Robin’ did not hang about, either, when contacted. ‘Let’s talk tomorrow,’ he responded within a few minutes. Not sure whether this meant he’d call me, or vice versa. He did call. And kept on calling at times when I was at a gig, at a record fair, watching the Champions League final. We finally spoke. Well, he spoke, I listened.

‘I’m 50 per cent collector, 50 per cent dealer’ he told me. ‘There are only two kinds of music – good music and average music. My collection includes everyone from Abba to Zappa, Clapton to Sun Ra. There are two kinds of people collecting now, either kids getting into it, or people with huge collections who are upgrading what they already have. I usually pay a quarter to a half of the Discogs.’ That did not sound like a particularly generous price going to the seller – especially as he emphasised that price was all important and that what he was really looking for was ‘as close to mint condition as possible’.

I was already suspecting that there was little chance of any of my ‘surplus to requirement’ records heading in his direction, but he asked what type of material I would be looking to part with. I threw him a string of 1960s/1970s band names, including Camel, the only one that provoked an admission of interest: ‘Let me check my list… there’s one Camel album I’m interested in, Stationary Traveller – I’d be prepared to pay five to ten pounds for a mint copy.’ I checked on Discogs and found the cheapest copy of this 1984 Decca album in near mint condition for both record and sleeve was £20. Buying one for a fiver would leave plenty of room for a sell-on profit. He asked if he could visit to ‘see for myself what you’ve got’ but I’d detected a lack of empathy between us and thought such a visit would be unlikely to end well, so I shut down the conversation by suggesting I’d write a list of potential sales and their conditions and send them to him. I didn’t.

A week after I sent him an email the man who advertised in the Harrow Times responded: ‘I’m really looking for records for my collection. If you have any you want to sell please let me know.’ I asked for his favoured types. ‘1960s/early 1970s rock’ was the response.

I know this was not a huge sample but I was already getting the impression that, by and large, these were people just wanting to cherry-pick records for their own collections at the cheapest price they could get away with. Nothing wrong with that in principle, but initially giving the impression that you have a wide range of interest and that you’ll probably buy across it is somewhat misleading. I also wasn’t keen to ask strangers into my home where, for all I knew, they might well be prepared to use high-pressure tactics to acquire the few valuable records in any collection at knock-down prices. But they could be useful for someone who had inherited a vinyl collection from a recently deceased relative and had no idea what to do with it or how much, if anything, it might be worth. Could be, but I doubt it. These ads are appearing in local papers and shops all over the country. My advice – be careful if you decide to respond.

My wife Sheila knows exactly what to do when I peg it. She has Julian’s number and contact details, and will almost certainly use them before remembering to contact a funeral director.

There are other options which allow you to retain the ultimate sanction of having a big say in how much you get for your records, while allowing you to keep hold of them if you aren’t offered that Holy Grail amount. They’re called eBay, Amazon and Discogs. They too have their drawbacks for the unwary or inexperienced.

With eBay, you can list items for a length of time decided by you, for a price decided by you – either the starting price for an auction lasting as long as you choose, or a ‘buy now’ price. On Amazon you can list your ‘for sale’ items at the price you choose and leave them there until they sell, or you forget you ever put them there. If the latter, you’ll probably be surprised eight months down the line when someone buys a record you now realise you took to the charity shop a while back. If this should happen (it did to me only recently) you’ll either have to come clean and risk abuse and a bad review from the would-be purchaser, or buy a copy yourself elsewhere, almost certainly for more than you are charging for your own copy (this is what I did), and swallow the loss to avoid the adverse fall-out.

So, you work out all the rules and offer your ‘no longer wanted’ titles for sale to the world at large. Not always easy to decide how much to charge for them. I recently decided I was unlikely to play a 1998 CD I owned by highly rated guitarist, the late Mike Bloomfield. A quick look on Amazon suggested it could be really valuable. Just one ‘new’ copy available for sale – and that at a price of £80.98 (+£1.26 p/p). I must admit I was sceptical about that price – after all, if there is only one copy on a site the seller might try it on by offering a massive price just to check whether anyone out there will fall for it. OK, I’ll have a little look at what it might cost me on the Discogs site – and discover that here, too, there is just a single copy for sale – and this one will cost almost twice as much in post & packing when sold – £2.50 in all. But if you want the CD, this is where you’d buy it, as the asking price for a ‘mint’ copy, is just a fiver. How about eBay? Three copies available here, the most expensive £8.77 + 6.14 p/p. My analysis – no one is likely to pay 80 quid, so forget that. But the other prices are low enough to make it well worthwhile sticking the CD back on the shelf!

You may though hit the odd jackpot or two after doing your homework. Who would have guessed I’d get 90 quid for a Paul Nicholas 1970 single Polydor B-side? Few would have realised that this obscure B-side, ‘Run Shaker Lee’ (A-side ‘Freedom City’) would have been so highly prized by collectors that they’d offer almost £100 to own my copy. That’s nice money for records which originally cost under a quid, but, again, there is a catch. Firstly you have to know that the record might appeal to collectors. Once you’ve done that, and found a buyer prepared to shell out unexpectedly attractive amounts of money, you have to pay the costs of putting it in front of them to buy, and then packing and sending it.

A member of a Facebook group, Show Me Your Record, posted a note to members, noting that a copy of an LP by the group Can appeared to have gone recently for an incredible 8,198 euros, despite the Rare Record Price Guide rating it a respectable but hardly stratospheric £150 in top condition. Another member quickly posted an explanation: ‘I think there are some “ghost-bidders”. After a “false” purchase, a complaint will be done to get back the eBay fees.’ So, beware of fraudsters who are seeking to give the impression that some records are worth far more than they genuinely are to sucker gullible buyers into paying through the nose. This is easily done, when you consider that there can be multiple original issues and very similar-looking reissues of certain records over a period of years. Some have genuine three-figure values whereas others are worth a fraction of that, yet cunning wording and misleadingly cropped photographs can give the impression that a goose-like record is worth a swan-like small fortune.

Even as I was writing this piece a friend informed me of a signed album by The Who – all four of their signatures on the record, up for sale at over $1000 on an auction site. He was impressed, particularly as the long-dead drummer Keith Moon had apparently signed a record which came out two years after he passed away. Caveat emptor. And that, as far as I’m aware, isn’t the name of a prog-rock band.

23 November 2017 was not only my 67th birthday, but also the first time I had endeavoured to sell some records via an auction. I had earlier attended a music auction at SAS Auctions, near Newbury. I had seen their catalogue, and I’d taken a fancy to a couple of items so I decided to spend a day doing something I’d never done before. It was a fascinating event and I ended up purchasing around 40 LPs and 12ʺ singles by P J Proby, someone whose records I had previously shown almost no interest in acquiring. This wasn’t, though, just a pile of his ‘greatest hits’ in various formats, but a whole box full of his output – singles, LPs, even a framed CD with an artwork showing the singer with some nubile friends. Many were on obscure labels which just looked different and which I figured I might be able to move on for a profit if I acquired them for the right price.

It was quite a nerve-wracking moment when I decided to join the bidding, having earlier taken the precaution of equipping myself with a bidding number just in case. The opening price for the Proby selection was, I think, £20. I just slung an arm up occasionally, mindful that I wasn’t looking to pay over 50 quid, and ended up buying the job lot for 40. There was a few extra pounds added to that for the auction’s commission. I should say at this point that I still own much of the material I bought – but I have sold a few of the records and at least retrieved what I paid.

This positive auction experience persuaded me that I should try selling, too, so I took a stern look at some of my vinyl-related possessions and dug out some lesser known Beatle-related LPs, singles, cassettes, picture discs I’d acquired, to create one lot; removed a heap of Beatles books from my private library, and packed up a few dozen press releases and publicity photographs of bands from the record reviewing days, chucked it all into the car and drove down to the auction house. The in-house expert took a quick look through the stuff, told me he thought most of it would be saleable and that he’d give some thought to how best to make it up into appealing lots. In the end he made 14 separate lots out of the material, all but four of which sold at the initial ‘birthday’ auction, the rest of which were re-offered at the next auction, when they too found buyers.

I can recommend the whole auction experience as being a positive one. Perhaps my view is coloured by the fact that I had some decent items to put up for sale and all I had to do ultimately after delivering them to the auction house was sit back and wait for the cheque to arrive. I didn’t even attend the sale in person, but it was easy to follow progress online.

I spotted a timely warning in an unlikely location, cautioning that a decision to sell off your vinyl in any way and for any reason might come back to haunt you. A full-page advertisement appeared in The Times on Friday 27 October 2017, alongside the illustration of a heap of records piled up, with an unsleeved one on top, that was clearly aimed directly at anyone with a record collection who was pondering a sell-off.

See whether you can guess what kind of business placed it?

‘You’re absolutely right.

Selling your record collection will create more space.

But it will also create something else.

A void.

Part of your essence will disappear.

Forever.

The party where you heard that amazing track.

Met that amazing girl.

Then…

The album you and your best mate bonded over.

The song that reminds you of mum.

It’s so much more than a record collection.

It’s the soundtrack to your life.

And you’re going to give it up to a complete stranger.

Really?’

This clever and subtle ad was placed by the Yorkshire Building Society.

I think I’ve discussed all of the viable selling methods in this chapter – if you don’t fancy experimenting with any of them, though, don’t worry, you could always just package them up and send them off to me… If you did that, you’d be adding to an already bloated collection to which I can never resist adding another member. How might I feel if, for whatever reason, the collection suddenly vanished?