Selling Your Records?
We are always looking for, and buying quality used LPs, 45s, and 78s. In general, we offer 50% of what we will retail the item at. It's a great idea to call our buyer line (513-580-8945) ahead of time, have a sample of your records in front of you, and be prepared to spend 5-10 minutes on the phone reviewing some titles or artists. No collection is too large or too small!
We pride ourselves on transparency in our buying and selling and the first part of that process is setting you (the seller) up with realistic expectations.
We buy from nearly every genre, including but not limited to: Rock, Pop, Jazz, Funk, Soul, Disco, R&B, Hip Hop, Punk, Metal, World, Latin, Electronic, Blues, Reggae, Country, Bluegrass, Folk, Soundtracks....the list goes on! Some genres that are a much tougher sell for us include older easy listening, and a majority of classical (although we do buy some!).
We do house calls for collections with more than 1,000 pieces (after the collection has been vetted by one of our buyers).
For more details presented as an FAQ for used purchases, please read on. But, for most inquiries a phone call (513-580-8945) is the best way to get your questions answered quickly!
This is highly dependent on whether the record is still currently being manufactured. If the record is "in print" we will almost always price a used copy of that record at ~70% of our normal cost for a new copy. So, we could likely list this record at $17.99 and could offer 50% of that. If the record is "out of print"*** and gone for good, we will likely follow closer to the current market value. So, if that record is now selling for $50 on websites like discogs and ebay (and we mean selling! - not asking prices), then you're probably safe to assume we will pay more like $20-25 back to you for that record.
*** Determining whether a record is in print or out of print is a very subtle thing. The aftermarket may ebb and flow on the price of a record since manufacturing takes so long in the current market and the broader market is not aware of whether the record has been discontinued or will be repressed. We do our best NOT to follow these ups and downs for a simple reason. We do not want a customer to walk in and pay $100 for a used record, and come back a week later only to find we restocked it brand new and are selling for $25. In cases like this, we will almost always recommend to the person selling to us that they would be much better off selling it themselves on a website like discogs instead of selling to us. Transparency is always the best policy here, so please, for subtle things like this, just ask. We will answer as openly and honestly as we can.
This question should be tackled individually for each collection at hand. The first part of trusting us to price your records fairly is to go over some examples with you. We need to make sure that we are all on the same page regarding how, why, and at what price we price our records. If we price our US pressings of Beatles and Led Zeppelin LPs at $20-30 in our store, and you completely disagree with our price, these are the things that need to be discussed beforehand. If we do not agree on what the retail prices of albums should be, then there's no need to go any further. Our prices are set by years and years of experience, knowing our local market, and always doing our best to stay in tune with the ever-changing online market. Our staff has a combined 75+ years of record buying experience, but in our opinion, experience alone isn't enough to price records. We never assume that just because we sold a record 10 years ago for $50, it's worth $50 now. We look items up. Everyone on staff is trained to be diligent in looking items up. Almost every single LP (except for very common LPs) will be looked up. It is the ONLY way to do this job 100% accurately. Anyone who claims they know everything will eventually miss an expensive record because they're too proud to look things up. We are not too proud, but we do pride ourselves on finding the oddities and rarities in old collections that can bring big money. One of our favorite parts of digging through collections is surprising someone with an offer for something they didn't expect. One of the best examples in recent memory was watching the owner of Plaid Room sort and make an offer on pop and rock LPs from a seller, but they were unhappy with the offer and thought the prices should be about twice what they were. They agreed to disagree but they did agree to let us look through the 45s, which they deemed "worthless". We pulled a copy of The Es Shades on United Audio which we offered them $850 for. In the end they realized we were being transparent and honest with our pricing and we settled on a price for the entire collection.
Money often comes up regarding larger collections. While all stores do have some sort of realistic budget for LPs/45s and what they're willing to spend, ours is very high, and has never been an issue. This question comes up with larger collections often. At some point sellers of very large collections find they'll hit a ceiling where nobody will offer more than say, $15,000 or $20,000 for a collection. For us, it all comes down to the retail value of the collection. If we see a collection worth $5,000, we're more than happy to pay $2,500. If we see a collection worth $250,000, we're more than happy to pay $125,000 (or more!).
This is a great question, and one I am happy to answer when folks ask. In some cases, I believe it IS better for you to sell it online yourself, if you have the know-how to grade properly and ship properly. Very high end records, $500+ records, it may be advantageous for you to sell online yourself. However, we also do offer closer to 60% for more expensive items such as this. Selling online has its woes, including credit card fees, Paypal fees, eBay fees, discogs fees, and dealing with returns/lost packages. If selling on a 3rd party platform, you can expect that 10-15% of your selling price automatically goes to the platform. Also something to consider is that if you sell over $600 worth of product on a 3rd party marketplace, you will get a 1099 from them at the end of the year where you're required to pay income tax on that. Unless you're tracking expenses as businesses do, you'll end up owing another 15-30% depending on your tax bracket.
This isn't to say that it couldn't be worth it sometimes, but time is also the trade off. Selling online, taking pictures, grading, it takes a lot of time. But, it's also fun (in our opinion!). If it sounds like your thing, maybe it's worth doing. But the trade-off you'll get by selling to us is saving time. We will pay fairly and you will get the cash/check right then, and not have to wait on items to sell online.
It absolutely depends! It doesn't hurt to ask. But, in general, we're only offering more than 50% on expensive (upwards of $100) records, or on entire collections where minimal cleaning is involved. The 50% we "keep" on collections goes to a lot of places. We have 3 staff members working full time on used LPs. They make salaries and have benefits. We pride ourselves on paying employees as fairly as we can in this line of business. We spend time going to house calls each week. We clean over 1,000 LPs per week. We spend time inputting these records into our system. We spend hours grading and describing records for online customers. In the end, the 50% we keep goes to paying the employees to do the best job they can, to keep our customers as happy as we can.
Yes! We offer 15% on top of the cash offer. For example, if your cash offer was $100, your trade offer would be $115 if all of the trade was taken. We can also do a partial trade in which case the trade value is prorated against the amount taken in trade. We're also more than happy to place the entire trade value on a gift card which can be redeemed in-store or online any time.
Any other questions?
If we still haven't answered your question, you can contact us below and we will get back to you as soon as possible.