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Don't despair, John. The record store where I worked dealt with used and new, both, vinyl and CD, both, but we often had to deliver the same news to people who wanted to sell their pop or rock lps. They were very often disappointed when we told them the same news, that we'd only be able to sell them for a dollar or two if we bought them from the person, and many not at all. It's not just jazz, in other words.
It's not the vinyl or the genre so much as what people who know their business and clientele know they can sell them for, or whether they can sell them at all.
It depends also where you live (major metro or not etc) but there's another factor, which is that so many people dumped so much vinyl over the years after the format change to CD, the used market for them got swamped. Supply and demand. I was buying jazz lps then for two bucks or three in the regular used bins, and for less than that in the bargain bins, and that was some years ago, now, early 90s.
But people are often disappointed, is my main point, when they go to a store to unload, regardless of genre. They think the lps are worth x dollars but the store's buyer can only think in terms of the y dollars someone might actually pay for one. So, knowing that, they know what they can buy them for and still make some little few cents profit -- if any. So many times the buying of them, in many used stores, isn't worth not only the money but the trouble and effort (which equals labor plus inventory and hence further expense for the store beyond the buying price alone). Many times it's just not worth it to the store. People used to get really upset with us sometimes but we had to make decisions based on reasonable expectations of sale in a relatively short period of time.
Maybe try some specialty stores, if you have any within a reasonable distance.
Our store's bread-and-butter used and new vinyl sales were hip hop, punk rock, reggae, and certain very select otherwise rock, but used vinyl buying and selling in general simply wasn't enough of a factor to talk about, independent stores existing on such a slim margin to begin with. Used jazz lp's unless something really special just weren't a factor enough to measure.
Certain lp's of course will sell and people can get a good price for them from stores but not lp's in general, jazz or otherwise. And compilation lp's or reissues were pretty much bargain bin items or not even that.
On the other hand, a bit further out from where I lived and where the store was, there was a classic rock focussed used store where I could go pick up some real gems fairly regularly for two bucks or three, simply because he didn't know about the music or what he'd bought in a big sweep of collection buying. He couldn't tell the gems from the grit, and the grit would often remain in his bins for years. But then, he went out of business, too -- records that sit in bins, not moving, add nothing to the bottom line but rather take away.
Heartless, true. But it's reality.
Me, I thank goodness for the hip hop kids. It was they who saved vinyl from oblivion and also are the ones we can primarily thank for it and the turntable's longevity, when they were both predicted by nearly one and all to be going the way of the Model-A.
One guy's junk is another treasure, but it also works the other way around.
Last edited by Gary Sisco; January-12th-2006 at 07:57 AM.
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