Trading records for a living

swears said:

Met somebody this weekend who reckons he makes around £20,000 a year selling records on ebay. Dunno if it was drunken bullshit, but do people actually do this as their sole means of support? He mentioned he sells vintage platters as well as new stuff that looks like it might become collectable, for instance he bought a few of Aphex Twin's Analord binders complete with all the releases then sold them later and made a couple of hundred quid.
I don't really think I've got the musical knowledge or business savvy to do this myself, but I find it interesting what the internet brings up in terms of making money.

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Yeah, a mate of mine does it fulltime, has been for years, trading in classical records. Nice, he gets to be at home with his daughter and visit people's homes for collections...the downside is that you can't move in his house for records. Literally. Cannot. Move.

mistersloane said:

The downside is that you can't move in his house for records. Literally. Cannot. Move.

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Some people would say that was an upside

used to fiddle about at this you need a car and the same discipline that any self employed person has to make a go of it there are lots of cheap record and cd's out there if you have the dedication to look for them met a guy who was making almost 6 figures with a team of data entry types and some better paid sorters think he ended up becoming a property developer...

i've done this for a living before, although i've just recently succumbed to the dubious joys of gainful employment. it's surprisingly easy to find very saleable stuff _ridiculously_ cheap if you're prepared to spend time and effort digging! it's actually quite fun - you get to visit people, dig through stacks of vinyl in people's attics, traipse around car boot sales and provincial charity shops and second hand record stores. even in london there's loads of gems to be had if you've got the time and inclination to trawl the mve bargain bins, for example. but, obviously, you need to know your stuff pretty well, since most of the mve staff are pretty savvy and it's kind of a case of out-manouevring them and trusting your instincts!


thing is, it's a lot _less_ fun and more stressful when it's your sole source of income and you need to make x amount of dollars to pay the rent! especially since ebay as a source of revenue is seriously random and volatile, esp given the faddish demands of the hipsterati (some 12" which might sell for £60 one month might barely go for £5 the next). anyway, it beats signing on and it paid my tuition fees when i was a student, although if you're doing it for a living it's only a matter of time before you start having to do tax returns, keep accounts, etc and it becomes increasingly like a 'proper' 'business' which for me sort of missed the point of doing it.

bunnyhausen said:

thing is, it's a lot _less_ fun and more stressful when it's your sole source of income and you need to make x amount of dollars to pay the rent! especially since ebay as a source of revenue is seriously random and volatile, esp given the faddish demands of the hipsterati (some 12" which might sell for £60 one month might barely go for £5 the next).

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i don't reckon its the hiphorrayti really, it's supply and demand, only a few people actually want a record, up until a point when all the people who really want it have it, no one really wants it anymore, i always find it best to wait for a few turns on a certain record, not worry about buying it for excessive amounts just check the progress...thing is by that time soul jazz have probably rereleased it.

dissensoid flashos does this for a living. flashos to thread!

mms said:

i don't reckon its the hiphorrayti really, it's supply and demand, only a few people actually want a record, up until a point when all the people who really want it have it, no one really wants it anymore, i always find it best to wait for a few turns on a certain record, not worry about buying it for excessive amounts just check the progress...thing is by that time soul jazz have probably rereleased it.

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yes and no.

you ARE right, for people willing to regularly spend over 100 dollars on a record, whether soul, funk, punk, hip hop, disco, etc, they are only a handful in each category in the world... i have sold duplicates of the same title and watched the sale price drop by like 1/3 by the time i sold the last one, just b/c 4 copies was enought to effect the market!

HOWEVER, there are "dabblers" in all of the above... like, as soon as DJ Shadow or Keb Darge comps a record, it goes thru the roof... a 20 dollar record becomes a 200 dollar record... and there is where the "hipster" tag comes in... trainspotters who only follow Darge or Shadow and not soul music as a whole will def. drive up the price on records...

ALSO, when a certain genre becomes "in", the amount of people into it grow... if it goes from say, 50 people to 150, that can mean a great deal for auctions... and vice versa... for example, right now 88-94 hip hop is not worth as much as it was 5 years ago... some of this is due to reissues (for example, Poppa Large by Ultramagnetic used to sell for over 100 dollars at times... since it was reissued, it sells for closer to 50 now...), some of it is due to serato (dj's are buying less vinyl), some of it is due to the rise of the southern hip hop and a decline of interest in NY hip hop...

anyways, selling records for a living is totally doable providing ONE thing:

YOU CAN'T COLLECT RECORDS YOURSELF!!!!!!

i like to sell on ebay for side money, if it's your main hustle, every time you get a dope record for cheap, you gotta flip it... find the record you've wanted for 5 years for 10 cents at a yard sale? sorry, better burn a .wav of it, b/c it's worth 500 bucks on ebay... i have def parted with a few things i really like and would love to floss to people like "oh, yeah, do you have THIS?!?!?!?", but in the end, i only keep the stuff i am really passionate about...

that said, any disco/electro fans want to buy Derrick Harriot's version of "black skinned blu eyed boys" off me?

Friend of a friend of mine does this. He's Japanese, lives here in the States, travels the country in this Econoline and scours record stores. Then, he sells the records in Japan. I get the impression he does quite well, but don't have any verification of that. I do know that he doesn't own a huge record collection himself.

Actually, that makes me think also of the fact that most of the record store owners I know have very small record collections themselves. It makes sense I suppose, but always struck me as slightly ironic.

vache said:

Friend of a friend of mine does this. He's Japanese, lives here in the States, travels the country in this Econoline and scours record stores. Then, he sells the records in Japan. I get the impression he does quite well, but don't have any verification of that. I do know that he doesn't own a huge record collection himself.

Actually, that makes me think also of the fact that most of the record store owners I know have very small record collections themselves. It makes sense I suppose, but always struck me as slightly ironic.

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i guess if you hear alot of stuff you are pretty careful about picking just the prime from the massive amounts of stuff that come in.

alot of serious people about music have smallish rather fussy record collections i reckon, but they get really upset when they realise they sold something or got rid of something good.

Revival 9,000,852...

You can definitely make money doing this...small fry next to making a living off it, but I know a couple who sold stuff from their arty & diverse but not enormous collection & charity shops & kitted out their new flat nicely from it, on Amazon Marketplace of all places...

Apart from the usual buying-new-&-random-stuff, I'm getting amazingly close to getting hold of most of the top end of my wants list & am going out on more trips to far flung towns than I have done for years & enjoying it immensely. I'm fascinated to know about the fabled 'warehouses' people mention occasionally though. Do any of these exist in the UK, or is it just the US & Europe? I've been to some chaotic shop units that are close, but are there still mad enormous treasure troves out there waiting to be plundered? I'm not sure I've the heart to start ringing Doris Stockhausen up & giving her a quid for some ultra-rare first pressing, but I did read a fascinating blues book with a chapter about the early blues archivists prospecting for blues stuff in the deep south, partly in a mercenary way & partly cos it sorta had to be done before it all disappeared...

dabbled in it over the past 12 months - selling maybe a dozen a month and pulling in £100 or so (sometimes more) per month - like pocket money on top of my salary - thing is it's actually a fairly big hassle to get them all packaged up and posted out so you end up constantly fucking around in post offices ... and if you flirt with auctions they can either go surprisingly well or frustratingly badly - i let go of 2 x model 500 lp's on R&S for well less than i should've just from being a bit stupid

what you do notice from being in the post office so often is just how many folk are doing it - you see all these other record dudes who are also turning up regularly with a big bag filled with 12x12 white cardboard sleeves and holding up the queue

you can print your own postage at the royal mail website now, though?

Not the sort of job I want, but I guess it's always there as a fallback...

A mate of mine does this full-time, and makes a good living at it, BUT full-time is more like ALL THE TIME...up at 5 to drive the van to a fair in Manchester on the Saturday, driving all over the place to look at collections etc and all his hours at home are occupied with cataloguing, ebaying and tax returns. You can make it work but its a full time occupation...

Plus I think a lot of the outlets are drying up - there seem to be a lot more people aware and interested and hunting stuff down, even chairty shops seem aware that records are collectable these days. I can't imagine there are that many warehouses with loads of killer stock left out there at least in the UK. The States is different, I think.

Yeah, I think it must be - some of the stuff I've checked out on Youtube etc re: Yank record shops/barns just makes yr jaw drop....I'm sure yr all aware of The Thing in Brooklyn, for a start, which looks completely insane...

Also, slightly off-topic, but was it on here once I saw a link to DJs' living spaces articles & Michael Reinboth's 60,000-item strong attic cropped up, with its reinforced floor?! http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3111/2756302303_da75d0c776_o.jpg Dude needs his hands tying behind his back!!

this has undoubtedly cropped up on here before ... but it's a good read nonetheless for those that haven't seen it ...

http://www.furious.com/perfect/recordfairs.html