Best way to rehome old LPs?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was debating whether to post this in MPSIMS or IMHO, but I happened to be at the MPSIMS home page so here it is!

We have a lot of records that predate the dawn of CDs. A few were ones we’d collected, many / most are ones we took after my father died 20+ years ago. We’ve never played them. And they are occupying two large-ish cabinets in the family room, that we really don’t need any more (we actually have a stereo receiver, a turntable etc. - none of which we’ve used in at least 16 years).

I thought about getting a USB turntable and “ripping” them, but really, who has time - and if it was music we care about, we’d have listened to it in the last 20+ years.

Is there a market for old LPs any more?

2

If you EVER get a decent answer to this, LET ME KNOW.

We’ll end up keeping the damned things until we die, then it will be the kids’ problem.
~VOW

3

There are a lot of second hand record stores that will buy your old LPs if they’re in decent condition. They do fairly well at garage sales, also. I donated a bunch of jazz albums to the local jazz radio station after I ripped them. And I sold some rarities on ebay some years ago.

You might try offering them as freebies on Craigslist or Facebook Market. People will always take free shit.

4

It depends a little on your goal in this. Do you suspect that you have some actual monetary value tied up in these albums? Value that you can convert to cash by selling them to a collector? Alternatively, are you just wanting to get these out of your life with profit not even entering into the discussion?

A few years ago, I had a large trunk full of mostly country and western must from the 40s and 50s. I couldn’t even get anyone to look at them. Absolutely zero interest although one guy did offer me five bucks for the empty trunk.

5

There are resale shops in my area that sell those and would probably be happy to take them, especially if you are giving them away. There are probably some in your area, too.

What genre(s) are we talking about? I still have my LPs and a working turntable and I do use them.

6

In a similar vein, I have a few hundred laserdiscs, many in fancy boxed sets…

7

All of the above, plus: advertise them a a lot. “200 1970s and 1980s LPs in pretty good condition, $30 takes them all”. You’ll probably get a $20 bill.

Do this AFTER the good stuff is SOLD off.

8

Got any real collectibles? Like Jonathan & Darlene Edwards? 1950’s picture disks? “Race” records (probably not if they’re post-78’s), but those are worth a little money.

Individually, only the rare & collectibles are worth much. Pick out a few titles at random and see what they go for on eBay; you’ll be discouraged. A garage sale may be your best bet unless you are willing to wait 50 more years.

9

Discouraged is putting it mildly. I had good luck with a number of collections like this, but most of what we had/have has little collecting value.

10

Not only do I still have most of my old LPs, but I also have my father’s collection of 78s.

11

Toss them in the dumpster and let the adventurous folks who like to prowl the landfills pick though them. With any luck, they’ll be on top of all the VHS tapes I shit-canned.

12

Depends. If any of it’s blues/big band/ Sinatra, I might buy some from you.

13

As a library volunteer, I would recommend that you NOT donate them to the library, unless they’re the type who will take anything.

Are there any thrift stores in your area that take LPs? Some people buy them for the cover art, even if they aren’t interested in the music. I can assure you that Reader’s Digest box sets and anything featuring Lawrence Welk are probably useful only for recycling.

14

Mostly worthless, but scarcity makes obscurity valuable. The reason I mentioned race records is they are relatively easy to spot (Okeh, Black Swan labels and others) and any you find are likely to be rare. They were marketed to a small, select audience that didn’t have the interest or resources to preserve collections, yet today, their cultural value is recognized. “Original” blues tunes were looked down upon in the 1900s-1940s, but their fortunes have changed over time.

15

I bought about 300 or so albums from an estate sale about 10 years ago, most was pop, rock and moldy oldies from the 50’s and 60’s. Paid $20 for them all. I sold a few on Ebay. A local used record shop wanted only a few and offered about 25 cents each. I offered the lot on Craigslist with the highest offer getting them all. The only offer I got was from a business in Portland, Oregon that designs the interiors of bars and restaurants. The offer was $2 each and I took it. The gal seemed very pleased with the selection.

16

Long overdue bumpdate here.

I purchased a new TV stand, and decided it was time to get rid of the old TV stand / stereo cabinet (the new stand is in the entryway, still in its case; we’ll need to assemble it).

I inventoried all our music, including pre-recorded cassettes, cassettes we recorded off of the LPs (prior to a trip 34 years back, when a car with a cassette player was a Really Cool Thing, and we knew we’d be in areas with no radio reception), and all the albums.

I looked around online, and discogs.com showed stunningly low prices for many of them - like the highest i saw was maybe 80 cents. Truly NOT worth the trouble of selling that way. I looked up a localish (about 12 miles away) shop that would review what you had, so we dropped a very heavy crate of them off Thursday. I had looked at their website and saw them mentioning things that they did NOT want - some specifics included pop such as Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond, showtunes, etc. Well, we had some of that, but I didn’t feel like digging through the bin and pulling them out, so I warned them that there was some of that in the mix.

He wound up taking a bit over half of our collection, which was a nice surprise. 70 albums, and he paid us 100 bucks.

He told us he didn’t take many comedy albums but did see one or two he wanted. When I compared what was still in the bin, to what we’d sent, he took a Mel Brooks / Carl Reiner album (2000 and Thirteen), Robin Williams’ Reality, What a Concept, both Steve Martin albums, and one Tom Lehrer (annoyingly, we had an old copy of An Evening Wasted as well as an unopened one, and he opened that one - why??? if he knew he didn’t want it??? unless my notes saying “unopened” were wrong which is quite possible). Most of the soundtrack / show albums came back home but Star Wars did not. Pretty much all the classical stuff came home. He did take the one 45 we owned - not sure WHY we bought a 45 of the Paul Simon Boy In The Bubble remix, and they normally don’t purchase 45s, but he wanted it.

I was surprised at some of the popular stuff he kept - pretty much all of it, really. I guess aside from that one Neil Diamond, most of it was more desirable. Neil came home, as did The Best of Bread, a Christopher Cross, a Fogelberg, Chuck Mangione, and one Rick Wakeman (he took all the others). Pretty much the epitome of fluff, all of them (except perhaps the Wakeman, which I’ve never listened to, so I can’t blame him).

PDQ Bach, suffering from the dual stigma of being both comedy AND classical, was also passed over.

Our next steps are: look over the list again, see if there’s anything we might want to replicate in CD or electronic format but cannot, and beg friends / neighbors to see who might own a USB turntable and would be willing to record it for us. Those albums would go into the basement with the crate of CDs (all long-since burned to iTunes). The rest will go to the local Goodwill store… except maybe the Bill Cosby albums which we will perhaps trample in a useless demonstration of our disapproval of the performer.

17

I sold a hundred LPs to a used record store 25 years ago and I got a dollar apiece for them, and that was about what I could get now. I still have 300 or so in mostly excellent condition and I still think about digitizing them, but as another poster mentioned, who has the time? Someone mentioned Discogs. One look at that site will bring your dreams of vinyl wealth down to earth. With rare exceptions, hardly anything you may have is worth more than a buck or two.

18

I shudder at what folks will do with my Seeburg 1000 records when I am no longer around. These records are super rare, and go for about $10 each on eBay, depending on year, library, and condition. But, they are a weird size and speed, use a special needle, and can’t be played on standard turntables.

Nobody will know that these are rare, and puzzling over what they are, they will probably toss them in the bin.

Wow, I didn’t know that the term designated specific records from a specific era.

I had heard the term “race records” from a coworker who explained that that’s what they called the R&B section of the record store when he was young. He also used the N word frequently, so I didn’t imagine this term had a more formal meaning.

Nevertheless, I don’t think I will incorporate this phrase in my day to day conversations.

19

I don’t think a true collector would have a problem with the term for 78RPM discs from 1920-1945. R&B, or Rhythm and Blues, was a later term, and to a musician or collector, designates a different genre, even though they are obviously related.

Here’s a good description of the situation and terminology from Race record - Wikipedia :