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.
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?