discogs marketplace?

val shively is famously like that. won't let you in without a list.

Val’s place is a ten minute drive from my house. I have never been because I wouldn’t even know where to start.

whoa I would kind of love to just hand a shop person my list, that is cool as hell. And it’s so old fashioned too <3

do these weirdos not know that they may get more sales from letting people browse?

the best thing about record shopping for me is finding amazing stuff that i've never even heard of before. kinda hard to put that on a list tbh

I’m with you, Nick. For me the heart and soul of the hobby is crate digging. But to each a zone, I guesp.

… ok but…why not both.. most “crate digging” stuff I’ve found since like 2008 isn’t any good

hardcore dil otm

there was SO much good stuff at the record show last Sunday. yeesh. and prices were good! i really did feel like peak vinyl had passed and people were getting real again. like they just wanted to sell stuff. i was buying stuff from a guy and he was basically giving me half off everything i wanted. it was great.

love to hear that

i sold a ton of CDs. i brought really good CDs. i probably sold a hundred CDs.

there was a guy who had multiple tables who had bought a distro and was selling new records for $15 a pop. i got sealed Bitches Brew reissues. Blue Note stuff. that massive beyonce on a horse thing with the book inside. people swarmed him. every dealer. i have no idea how much money he made. but what i loved was that he was just blowing it out like the old days! not trying to get every last cent out of it. i bought maria three sweet dorothy ashby reissues.

Peak vinyl has absolutely passed. The used market is normalizing a bit. We’ll probably still see high spots getting higher, and with more mainstream adoption we’ll continue to see Herb Alpert and John Denver at “retail” prices ($10+) but the idea that every hoard of beat-up shite is a goldmine is hopefully on the wane.

i keep thinking that record shows are my future. not now but someday. i made as much in one day as i make in a week. i could do two a month and not have any store overhead and probably be good. we are celebrating our 15th year in Greenfield and the 20th anniversary seems like it might be a cool time to get out and wind down. cuz old. but we will see.

don’t get me wrong, I love “crate digging”, I am straight up obsessed with browsing in record stores, I literally dream about it every night. I tend to want to go through EVERYTHING at a store, shop until I get light headed. Sometimes I wish that stores didn’t organize their stock at all, by far my favorite thing to do is go through the recent arrival bins.

Personally, though, i did a cull recently and sold a bunch of stuff I punted on over the years that just didn’t do it for me. The process just kind of lowered my enthusiasm for that kind of thing. Too much stuff just taking up space that I don’t especially love or even like listening to much.

And where I live now, any random cool looking thing is not going to be in any bargain bin. I see cool railroad field recordings from the 50s/60s and they’re like 30 bucks. Maybe I just need to get out of the Bay Area. There are a few stores around that are pretty chill. I need to check the Groove Yard out, it’s fucking criminal that I’ve never been there.

super happy to hear recent development re: dying down of vinyl bubble tho!

yeah I'm about ready to do 50% off on all my sell crates, doing a show in May

I just checked a Melanie De Biasio record from a few years back, fully expecting to snort derisively at the price - damn if it isn't an entirely reasonable £20 including postage. Could be an anomaly but really hoping it's a sign things have calmed down.

Oh man that's weird, I was searching through my archive of unlabelled interviews WAV files for something yesterday and found an interview with Melanie from a decade or so ago - she's great. But that might have been the first time I'd thought of her in years and years.

Someone ordered a 7" single from me, spent more than half an hour searching for it before realising it must have sold at a record fair last year, sent an apology and a refund - all within hours of sale, mind! - and the reward I get from her is negative feedback.

How annoying. If I am looking to buy from a seller with recent negative feedback I’ll always check to see what it was for. I’d be happy to order from someone that’s made the occasional stock check muddle. Not all negative feedbacks are equal.

xp you might be able to get that removed, although I hear it takes a while

that's so lame.

A kid gave me flaming negative feedback over some trivial thing. I worked it out with him & he rescinded. I think a lot of younger folks don’t grok the idea of customer service, or that every online shop isn’t Amazon somehow. I bet you can work it out with her.

got cold-messaged by someone today that they have a record that’s on my wishlist, offered it to me for cheaper than what it’s currently going for on the marketplace. they otherwise have nothing listed for sale and no buyer/seller rating even tho they’ve had an account since 2014. a scam?

What a weird scam. But yes, warning do not get scammed

maybe they're just trying to dodge paying fees? but yeah I probably wouldn't get involved

That's an old Ebay scam. If you buy outside the system you don't have any recourse (I guess unless they let you use PayPal).

not Discogs but related:

bought a book at a decent price from a seller on Abe, didn’t do much research into them but they had a good rating.

i got sent the wrong book, the sort of thing that isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, totally useless. i messaged them, they said sorry for mixup, they would get the right book to me. then they said getting the right book to me was impossible, but would i like something else from their inventory because a return hurts their rating. i said no.

asked my bookseller pal about it— it’s a regular scam. a seller will list a book they don’t have, then attempt to buy it from another seller for cheap and make a tiny bit of profit. the issue is that sometimes these “booksellers” don’t keep up with pricing trends, so (as in my case) the book I ordered was being offered for 10-40 less than from other sellers. so because they couldn’t find a cheap copy to sell me, they sent me some trash, say it’s a mistake, then try to get you to choose something else from their “inventory” to keep their rating. insane and maddening.

possibly of interest

Adventures in buying and selling used books online: ABE, fvck bezos but Amazon secondhand, other suggestions, tales, advice, warnings and more

oh, duh, sorry for clogging up this thread, and thanks!!

no worries. in fairness, none of us have really kept the thread up to date

Right after having to battle a seller for sending me a shitty copy of a VG+ album, the next seller accepts my payment, refunds me (including shipping) because he said the record wasn’t in as good shape as he remembered. Good to know there are some good ones out there.

one weird thing - have put my settings so that only people with over 95% positive feedback can order from me. and yet it still allows accounts with no purchasing history (essentially a 0% positive feedback score) to place orders. and hey surprise, surprise... they're a non-paying customer after more than a week

guess they'll be getting a 100% negative feedback score sometime in the next couple of days

yeah that's a thing. I guess it would put off new people from joining the site if they can't buy anything. so the feedback limit only applies to people that have feedback

got cold-messaged by someone today that they have a record that’s on my wishlist, offered it to me for cheaper than what it’s currently going for on the marketplace

yeah that's BS. they can enable 'make an offer' on a listing if they want to do that.

Sigh yet another “VG+” record with EX in the description that has significant scratches and a very good plus helping of surface noise.

But the fella has perfect feedback and a fair bit of it. I would feel like a picky weirdo leaving negative feedback! Maybe my expectations are too high.

he is probably very generous with returns/refunds if he has great feedback

significant scratches and surface noise do not an VG+ make

^^^

Use lighting, people

my fave is still when someone describes a record or cover or both as near mint and then goes on to describe everything wrong with it! people just really don't know what grading is. or a lot of people anyway. you can get it wrong sometimes if you are doing something in a rush - it has definitely happened to me - but you can't think that "like new" would include wear and tear to something?

What gets me is when something is missing a significant component but you have to find that in the notes because the remaining parts are what they are grading. I recently bought a box set and everything was in great shape. But there was no box. The cds had individual cases which were NM and that’s how they graded it. I should have paid more attention, but something isn’t NM if half of it is missing.

I hate those, plus they drive down the median price when someone sells like the single bonus 7" from a huge box. there's gotta be a better way to list incomplete items.

I do find it a bit irritating when you're looking at something rare and see "25 copies from $19.99" and go holy shit the price dropped and then you look and it's just one copy priced that low with a description like "DISC 2 ONLY, also I will not ship but rather will just throw like a frisbee in the direction of your house"

exactly

I remember the pre-Discogs and eBay days when you bought used records from stores/dealers in Goldmine or mailing list (paper) catalogues and the grading was very very conservative ‘cause these were people who made their living from selling records and reputation mattered. Now that anyone can do it I don’t buy records through the mail anymore (or at all). CDs are a little more forgiving of flaws.

Midnight Records (NYC) and Vinyl Ink (Silver Spring) were my go tos.

yeah but what if you have a really nice copy of a box set but one of the discs has a cigarette burn or something? sometimes you need to reunite long-lost siblings

xp