How To Identify a Vinyl LP and Determine Value | Talking About Records

Maybe its just me, I use Discogs & the amount of information is confusing & overwhelming. Many times I give up!

Tri colored Are You Experienced? OG pressing. Done. For vintage, JUST LEARN YOUR LABELS. The matrix obsession is weird and annoying. Now we got 432 versions of Grease OST or whatever because some newb found a copy with -GH2 on the end and now they're compelled to submit their newly discovered version lol. Please make it stop. And thanks for not even mentioning popsike. Terrible resource for common records.

Excellent tuition, thank you. Pity you don't post to Australia, would love to visit your store one day

I honestly look it up on discogs especially it its an artist I've never heard of. Then again I'm never really looking to sell my stuff so it's more or less piquing my curiosity on whether or not I should buy it. I usually do in the end

I’m just starting to educate myself on the Discogs, trying to add to my collection.

A friend of mine actually showed me his entire collection and on Discogs it came up between $45,000 and $92,000 , between medium to high. Unreal.

I'm not, at the moment, interested in those specifics or values, but have often wondered how to determine what you have, and this was a great video! Thanks for it!

No. Fuck Discogs for actual value of records. Inflated prices set by shitty sellers see a record that sold for $300 1 time and list their vg- copy of a fairly common record and no pics of actual item for sale. As a collection database? Great but even that is flawed.

Anyone that pays over $2 for a copy of the LP for Billy Joel The Stranger is an idiot!!

Great Chanel 👍. Been a member of Discogs since 2007. Been buying records since 1978 (I’m 54 !! 😮). It was only in your other video about recommending to catalogue one’s collection on Discogs, that I thought, yeh, I definitely should. I’ve just started doing it. It’s very addictive! True detective work! I have a couple or so thousand, so nothing compared with some of your audience! But the Discogs thing puts a whole new interest on what one has, and secondarily , what they’re worth 👍.
Love the content mate 👍👍👍

I like the discogs app but when I'm trying to figure out which pressing I have, I use the full website. The app is just too limited when you're dealing the a record with a lot of pressings (Dark Side Of The Moon - I'm looking at you!)

Thank you for posting such a practical and thorough video! Fantastic info!

This is terrific. I learned most of this stuff the hard way, through trial and error, back in the early 2000s, with some help from printed Goldmine guides. I wish I'd had this tutorial back then. (I just looked it up and Discogs launched in November, 2000, so before that ebay was pretty much the only online game in town.) I love doing research anyway, though. Thanks for the very well put-together lesson. Love the split screen and iPad screen recording.

Bravo GI. I’ve begun cataloguing my collection and have already discovered all your pointers. But I have a challenge for you. I have found a number of records that have no exact matches on Discogs database. So I’m starting to figure out how to make a submission. And it’s a bear!! How about a ‘how-to’ on that? Thanks.

Very informative video, learnt a lot, thank you

There is also ValueYourMusic

What’s my records worth? a lot to me and that’s all that matters.

Thanks for all the great information! One question-- how do you identify the pressing if the record is sealed and you don't want to open it?

Great video for grading Records. Allthough an European buyer I must testify that from my experience US sellers are by far the most honest about the condition/value ratio of the records. A record graded VG+ in US is graded Mint in Europe and costs more in Europe all the time.

A much better discussion of dead wax which is nearly impossible to read. Pitman vs Terra Haute is so difficult. May look just the same. But a much clearer attempt.

3:00pm Thank you for making this video, so very much helpful, thanks for breaking everything down to understand.

if its sealed your screwed on what one it is

Does an autographed album always boost the value?

Very helpful. Convinces me I don't have enough time left on the planet to value my 3 boxes of old vinyl records.
Don

Very informative presentation. I agree that the dead wax characters are not the end all and be all for identification. The plant could have inserted the updated label while the same stamper remained in the press!

What do you do when it is not on DIscogs? I am not completely new to vinyl records, but not an expert, either. I bought most of my records from garage sales, and auctions, a few years ago, before the resurgence really caught on. I figured out Discogs a few years later, but I now have a couple dozen records that are not on the site. In most cases, the version I have is not on there, but I have a few that don't have any listing, at all. Is there some way to find out what I have?

Can you help me find a resource that helps me find the gold mine standards? You mentioned the difference between grading the vinyl and the jacket. All I have found online is a grading that combines them both. I am trying to sell my collection and be able to understand how to differentiate between the two would be of great help thank you so much.

Thank you so much! You are so patient and helpful in your explanation. My LP is still sealed so I can't read those numbers you were talking about. What do you do in this instance?

I have a zepp ll with no barcode still sealed . Any idea how much it may be worth. Thanks

There is something you forgot to mention. Selling online has a cost and a 100$ record sold is not 100$ in your pocket. There is commissions to pay. 9% to Discogs and another 4 to 6% between Paypal and banks..total is around 15%. It means you get 85$ left. You have to take this in consideration when you value a record which wont sell on Discogs or Ebay but in a record shop or on a Facebook page!

I own a copy of the “Concert for Bangladesh” and the record made a by rs🎉ads aresGeorge Harrison, “All things must Pass”. Jackets worn, Vinyl is pristine. Any advice for an old Lady trying to return some cash to my own. House after years of taking them❤ with me.

Ultimately the value is what someone is willing to pay for it.

Thanks so much for this video. I'm new to the vinyl scene (after years of wanting to finally get into it), and I've discovered Discogs and figured out quite a bit, but your video reaffirmed and also taught me some things! Great video!

Awesome video. Thank you so much from someone getting back into the vinyl game

Excellent advice - thank you

This videos only helps to resellers and scalpers, so you need to pay more silly!!!

Great video !

I use discogs to keep a record (pun intended) of what I have, and what song is on what album. But the value of records for me is in the music they contain, I don't care what someone else wants to pay for them.

Excellent Video! So informative and I now have a great understanding of how to reserach my LP's, thank you.

i would use discogs… but the records i just got were made before the barcode was invented 😂😂 so thank you for this video!!!

I sometimes don’t trust what i run through Discogs because the first copy’s it shows are unofficial but when you scroll on it shows official releases….I have 2 albums i’m not sure about and it bugs me…

Lets say I have a perfect Mint Record but the album jacket sucks. Where can I get a new jacket or what do I need to make a new jacket

I don't understand why on earth you don't use more filters in the search. You're going to potentially manually examine more than 70 releases? Filter additionally by year and label. Many of those 76 will be reissues, released in different years by different labels.

There is a huge problem with discogs. It differentiates between releases, not pressings. A release may be pressed from different lacquers cut with different equipment by different engineers at different plants. For example, we may both have a pressing of Rubber Souls, but yours might be pressed from a lacquer cut by the renowned Wally Traugott at using excellent and well-calibrated equipment at Monarch, a plant well known for top quality pressings. Mine might not have a signature identifying an engineer, meaning at the very least the master is almost certainly lower quality, having been cut by an engineer of lower calibre, especially if it was cut at the Hollywood plant using a less well-maintained, less well-calibrated lathe. Maybe mine was even pressed at Scranton, a plant notorious for inconsistent quality, often producing records with a lot of surface noise, warp and distortion. Yours is worth a heck of a lot more than mine. I totally get that it would be impractical for discogs to differentiate between every slight difference, but it should be done at least by pressing. If I buy a particular record, I want to know what master it came from. Yes, I know from experience that that can be challenging. My copy of Dark Side of the Moon has side A pressed from a master cut by Ken Perry and side B cut by Wally Traugott. However, a single lacquer would be used to cut at least 15,000 records, and as many as 100,000 (possibly more if during a time of high demand and manufactured by a less discerning label, perhaps many of the latter end of the run being used as the notoriously bad club editions), so there are still considerable numbers of each individual pressing. I'm currently trying to find a copy of Dark Side of the Moon cut by Harry Moss, but all of his cuts are mixed up with lesser cuts under the same issue. What am I going to do, contact 80 different sellers to ask if their matrix bears the HTM signature? So, I would say that the valuations on discogs are at best very loose ballpark figures. If you want to know a more accurate value of your records, you'll have to do more research. This is why some copies of Are You Experienced sell for upwards of $200 and some sell for less than $20. Yes, condition has a lot to do with it, but it's also a lot to do with whether your copy is a cut made by Bill Lacey or some Tom, Dick or Harry (except Harry Moss 😂).

Thanks NT this is very clear, I learned a lot😃

Very helpful. Thank you.

Yes @rayecker & someone paid $450.00 including shipping/duties for a sealed copy of Moody Blues Days of the Future Past first pressing (MFSL). U got to luv Vinyl.

I really dislike people who want to flip (excuse the pun) records for profit, all it does is push up market values and out of the hands of music lovers...but I guess that is like everything these days.

Great video, really helps me with valueing LP's