BACKTRACKING FORWARD: COLLECTING VINYL 101
posted in: Features
Nothing beats the feeling of walking into a record store with hours to kills and a pocket full of cash. There are no limits as you walk down the aisles, thumbing through racks and pulling out all your favorite albums. Of course the adrenaline rush obtained from this experience comes crashing down when the cashier rings up your purchases and you drop a month’s worth of food money on a stack of wax.
A few years after I started collecting vinyl, I realized this wasn’t the route for me. Why pay fifty dollars for that mint James Brown LP when with a little digging and detective work, you can find it for one dollar? It’s hard to locate a record store nowadays that is not hip to eBay. Gone are the days when gems could be pulled from a store’s boxes and bought for peanuts. Once I recognized this was the story, I went a step further and became a serious excavator of vinyl, inventing crafty methods to obtain records on the cheap. Below are some tactics I have used to find albums over the years, listed in order of difficulty. The first few are generally achievable by anyone, but the list gets a bit more creative as it progresses.
Garage Sales and Flea Markets
The joy of hunting at flea markets and rummaging through the contents of people’s homes is a timeless tradition. Many diggers will swear by these classic methods for obtaining records, and with a little perseverance, they will not do you wrong. Back in the day, buying records at these types of sales was a bit easier, cheaper and there was less competition. Now you have to wake up at 4:30 AM to get first pickings at the flea market not to mention have hundreds of dollars in gas money in order to drive from garage sale to garage sale only to come up empty handed after being told you were one hour too late because someone came and bought ALL the records. Nonetheless, being in the right place at the right time can mean walking away with a huge stack of records for a buck a piece.
Enlist the Help of Your Friends and Family
Here is an easy tactic that might produce only one or two responses, but the amount of energy exerted is minimal and can be done from the comfort of your own home. Craft an email that explains who you are (son/daughter/cousin/BFF ) and asks if anyone has records in their house that they want to part with. Have your family members or friends email blast this to their coworkers and wait to see who responds. This method works best if the person being utilized works in a larger office setting with cubicles, water coolers, etc.
Canvas Your Neighborhood
Type up a letter introducing yourself as a member of the community and explain how you have discovered the joy of collecting record albums. Ask neighbors if they have any forgotten, dusty old boxes of LPs in their house that they would be willing to part with. Print up as many copies as you want and hit the streets, dropping them off in every mailbox in a fifteen mile radius of your abode. Go home and wait with baited breath next to your telephone, ready to field calls for the next few days. Be forewarned though”you may have to endure endless amount of Mantovani, Herb Alpert and classical records before you find the golden collection.
Befriend the Receiving Manager at your Local Thrift Store
Thrift stores provide an infinite amount of choice vinyl if you have the time and persistence to constantly check in for new donations. Thrift stores are also an obvious place for anyone to dig for wax so chances are you will be a day late and have missed the killer jazz collection that was just dropped off. Instead of giving up on the chase, become friendly with the receiving manager (this works best at larger, chain-wide stores found all over the country.) Initially this will entail dropping in every morning and being known as “the person looking for records” to all of the employees. Keep up a rapport by knowing everyone’s names, acknowledging birthdays and maybe even buying gifts for the staff during the holidays. If all goes well, you will start getting calls from the store letting you know that a collection came in and they will hold it for you to get first crack. At this point, your presence will have dominated that store thus preventing other diggers from getting dibs on the good records. Repeat above steps for every thrift store in a twenty mile radius of your home.
Become the Vinyl Kingpin of your Town
Start hosting a monthly vinyl sale inside your garage. Spread the news via Craigslist, supermarket bulletin boards, signs on telephone poles and word of mouth. By the time you have initiated all of the previously mentioned digging methods, you will have accumulated more vinyl than you know what to do with and will have obtained heaping amounts of doubles and albums you have no interest in keeping. After two years of making a name for yourself through your sale, people will begin to refer to your garage as the place to buy vinyl in the neighborhood and you will come home on some days to find boxes and boxes of records left on your porch. Welcome to my world folks.
One of the best investments you can make as an aspiring vinyl excavator is to print up a stack of “Album Collector” business cards. This can be done very cheaply at www.vistaprint.com. Hand out those suckers to everyone you meet”parents of friends and the elderly are the best. You will be surprised at how many people hold on to your information, sometimes calling back two years later!
Each day, so many new people enter into the world of vinyl digging, contributing to a fierce and competitive market. The world’s supply of used vinyl is finite and as time goes on, collections will continue to become scarcer. The above tips are only a few I have implemented to be the first person to get at a collection. With a little creativity and determination, you can come up with innovative new methods to start accumulating so many records that the foundation of your house will start to crack. And who knows, maybe you will beat me to the next stash of wax if you are lucky.
Keep Digging!