The Best Stores For Vinyl Are Online, But How To Distinguish An Excellent Store From A Bad One?

For some individuals, vinyl albums will forever remain the best sounding sort of music medium, regardless of what new technologies may or will emerge. The sound of the tiny static in the background and hearing the needle hardly scratch the album is what some music lovers call perfection. As each year goes by, fewer and fewer records are being sold because of the rarity of the medium, but the few stores that exist still manage to survive and sell old LPs to adoring fans. Today, a large amount of the vinyl-only stores survive because of the duplicate, sealed copies bought by individual sellers or the used copies donated from music labels that had extra copies of an LP. Finding a record dealer online is not complicated, but coming across one of these businesses in your local neighborhood is like discovering a diamond in the sand.

What to Look for

If you submit the words “vinyl records” into a search engine, chances are you’ll locate multiple dealers that sell a range of albums and a range of different prices. All the stores you do come across will sell albums in three different conditions: used, sealed, or sealed with a bend in a seam, and of course, the used albums may have some discolored artwork on the front. Say you wanted to purchase a Jimi Hendrix vinyl; chances are, much of what you see has been used, with a few stores selling only new copies; however, the record sold will be sure to work and come with the original album artwork.

The state of the record itself will determine the price tag, and a person will pay a bit more for the same Hendrix album if it’s sealed compared to an LP that was opened and had a bend in the seam. Even if the album is sealed, if a record is rare and fewer numbers exist, stores are more likely to sell the rare LP for more cash than the one still sealed. All online vendors will write detailed descriptions of the state of the album, from used to sealed to sealed with a bend in the seam. However, a website should give some money-back guarantee for unsealed albums, stopping you from worrying that your investment will break after a few uses. Another aspect you might want to look for in an online store is bargain bins and discounts provided on LPs as you will be able to save a bit more dough. For instance, you may be able to locate Metallica vinyl records for $10 less and different albums at another store.  Another aspect to consider is looking for stores with wide selections of music from the artist you want an album of, as the larger the inventory, the less expensive the prices.

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