Record stores are slowly dying off, but one marketplace is healthier than ever. RA's Richard Carnes takes a look at how Discogs has changed the face of record buying.

I just couldn't imagine the internet without Discogs - invaluable!

Discogs is pretty amazing when you get into it. One thing about vinyl.... it might cost more to start with, but when you sell it for 3x as much 10 years on, that's an ok deal.

i love vinyl, but it is not the future in any way. Release on vinyl and you are limiting yourself to being able to sell to about 5% of your potential clientel..

I'm a total Discogs addict.
my discogs username is Doors.

Excellent feature! I've been using Discogs for ages, very handy in many ways if you are a vinyl collector.

Just what i've been up to recently! Its amazing what some of it is worth - things that I thought wouldn't be worth the plastic going for a song and others which I've loved and cherished over the years being worth peanuts. Love it though!

i luv discogz

COMPLIMENTS

use it all the time, great article!

God bless Discogs.

Discogs ? one of my most visited sites, after google ^^

and what Housetunes write:
I just couldn't imagine the internet without Discogs - invaluable!

BIG SIGN

I'm on there several times a day, but I do miss the older days of discogs when more users posted reviews and info about the records. I'm guilty of no longer doing this as well.

Discogs is very dangerous for your wallet... But also so completely and unbelievably amazing... Much respect!

Its amazing what its done for market information to the point where you can hit up a record store and check the price of anything you might think of getting on your Bberry / Iphone... Blows my mind. Its created a global, transparent market

Discogs is good for it's marketplace aspect, but for information alone I find Musicbrainz a much better resource - musicbrainz.org/
According to the article, Discogs has 230,000 releases whereas Musicbrainz has almost 800,000.

i've been using discogs for 2 years now... im addicted
totally indispensable.. and very dangerous for your wallet indeed

I've had a pretty good experience buying on discogs, but sometimes it's hard to find sellers in the U.S. for rare releases.

My one gripe would be that the site desperately needs a redesign. I know they recently redid the homepage but I feel like the whole interface is sorta outdated. They should copy allmusic.com

Best place to find gems. It's the closest thing I have to a proper record store.

I would be lost without the Discogs wantlist. Most of the people I buy from are record stores in the USA. With the crazy shipping costs from Europe I stopped buying records from there and started focusing buying exclusively through Discogs. I can almost always find what I am looking for.

Great article!

'My one gripe would be that the site desperately needs a redesign. I know they recently redid the homepage but I feel like the whole interface is sorta outdated. They should copy allmusic.com'

personally i love the simple design...has everything you need and its fast to load.

'I'm on there several times a day, but I do miss the older days of discogs when more users posted reviews and info about the records. I'm guilty of no longer doing this as well.'

i always used to follow the rule that if i came across a record with a review...to immediately check it out. if someone put the effort in to write the review then it very well might strike a chord with myself!

Discogs has well over 2 million releases.

I obtained these figures from Kevin directly at the end of last month. While the Discogs numbering system is currently on 2203493, it is possible that he may have omitted podcasts or digital releases from his statistics.

yeh love discogs...amazing online store and music discovery source, especially since they link release pages with the Youtube audio/videos...i still review my faves from time to time under the name "restless"

Just searched a few house and techno artists, and it's clear that Musicbrainz is far from comprehensive in these genres, and even things such as tracklists are missing from mainstream releases. You're also quoting an incorrect figure incorrectly. I cited that there were 260,789 releases in the database.... in 2004.

So out of 2.3 million entries 230k are non digital, that's ridiculous, they only started adding digital release recently.

2004, I see.

good point, they spoke also about the speculative aspect thanks discogs.

for the big name or the hyped release you can see people sell the record at double price just few monthes after their release, as soon as it is sold out in regular shops. that´s not underground. some buy records just to sell them later, more expensive of course. furthermore, as long as no one pay the required prices, the vinyls lay somewhere and never go out of their sleeve , indeed, ... they could lose value. It doesn´t serve the music. it´s not about the music anymore, which is not played because the support, the vinyl, is waiting for being sold at a speculative price.

nevertheless, the good side of all this is that they are a lot more of underestimated records as overestimated ones, and discogs do help to give them a new life changing hands and being played.

essential, how would i know what i know about my music? the marketplace is welcomed, its been interesting to see that side of it grow so quickly!

du bist raus.

The day I discovered Discogs, a whole new world opened for me.

Love the site and information, service it provides.

I owned a physical record shop for 5 years and the site helped me immensely in buying and selling used stock at a fair value. I referred many a customer to the site whenever they were requesting specific titles I just couldn't afford to carry or were out of press. It may have been competition, but I felt the site deserved the promotion regardless.

Long live discogs!

Great place to sell your vinyl though

haha yeah its been killing my wallet these days hehe...great site..

its a modern way of crate diggiing/hunting for rare vinyl. Better than trailng through beatport!

love it, i've only recently started dj'ing with vinyl and i visit the site wayyyy too much. recently found a skull disco record for CHEAP via a shop that seemed to deal exclusively with funk/soul vinyl.

but a question: is there any indicator on, say, a label or artist page, that a specific release will have a review under the info section?

Without record shops (physical and online) there will be no records. Without new records there will be no discogs marketplace - just one massive overpriced car boot sale. And then we'll all be wondering who shot the last record shop, blaming each other.

When was the last time you asked discogs for a recommendation, stood at it's decks or let your fingers wander through it's racks?

Discogs is soulless - even eBay felt like crate digging sometimes.

Yeah I sold something for £30 the other day that I bought from hmv 10 years ago for £3.99. I thought it was shit.

I love discogs , but the forum on there is full of the most anal bastards ever.
and one guy in particular 'jayfive' has got to be the most tedious cock i have ever encountered on any forum... but then again he is fucking a fat girl and it does then to mess with you head.

The whole concept is anal by default though if you think about it. I dread the feedback I get when I send stuff out....... 'thanks mate, but there's fingerprints on it.'

It's mecca of record stores. I cant imagine myself without it! it's the best!

If it weren't for Discogs, and the weeks that I spent searching it, no way would I have been able to amass such a diversity of music. It really allowed me to connect musical styles between which I'd never seen much of a relationship before.

It is a great resource, many things seem to be adapting & changing because of the internet, the decline of the record shop & the growth of Discogs is a good example of this.

Nothing stays the same, I say embrace Discogs, its a brilliant tool in numerous ways.

Good article too, very interesting, cheers.

For me it's just not a recordstore. It's much more...i started with Discogs back in 02 and not for buying or selling records.
But just to have my collection in a nice way registered. If you have a big vinyl collection it's easy to find records back. Nowadays even my records here @ home are ordered like it's on the Discogs Database.
I started buying around 06 through Discogs, records i couldn't find anywhere else.
Only the prices are sometimes overrated f.e. if Villalobos plays a certain record the prices on Discogs will rise for sure.
I must say all records that i bought on Discogs are all delivered. So can't complain about that.

For everyone who manages their collection via Discogs: Our boy Wendis wrote a neat Database tool to calculate overall min/max/median value based on the selling prices at the Discogs Marketplace. Get it from http://www.wendis.de/

no, they should not redesign their site. it already became to much web 2.0 like.
nobody needs an overloaded site with lots of graphics and sounds.
i started using discogs because of their minimalistic design with the aim of quick and easy information gathering.

why not releasing vinyl and giving mp3 for free as bonus? like some labels do recently. so i and other people could stop recording bought records and encoding to mp3.
before saying that we are limiting ouselves you should start thinking in different ways.
other than that: i am sorry for all the people who never understood why vinyl rules and why it is also useful to have mp3. i live in both worlds, and i am very happy there.

Well is there still a digital clientel ? what does the digital market represents in term of sells nowadays ?
it is not easy to get the figures ...
I dont think vinyl will come back in mass , but it proves that there are still passionate people out there ...

the point of discogs is not to let your fingers wander through its racks. a record store is half a library: the bookshelves. discogs is another half of a library: the online catalog. both infrastructures are valuable.

though you can't wander its shelves, you can search the catalog for anything, anywhere, and be connected with a supplier. it's an interface that straddles overabundance of information with the physical means of distribution. this is the amazing thing.

i've bought records from plenty of friendly discogs sellers who provided me with recommendations. i've also physically met with them at times to make transactions, and we had friendly conversations like you would at a record store.

Music and the Market(place from Discogs):

"The ease of resale is a problem on this occasion, as standard consumers become priced out of the market due to in-the-know profiteers." (quote from the interview)

As every global website, the marketplace from discogs has advantages and disadvantages. One advantage is the availability and easy access to music you are searching and want to buy. But this also means a big disadvantage when people who are more economists than music lovers will (mis)use this global marketplace in order to make money by reselling (rare) releases. Of course, you could say: 'Hey, that is the market and the economy!' But I just do not want to connect music - wich is a form of art for me basically - with the rules of a free market. There will always be people that will (mis)use the possibilities offered by the marketplace from discogs in order to make personal, financial profit. So I would prefer discogs not supporting such behaviour. Unfortunately, the only 'solution' I can imagine right now is closing the marktplace.

Although I can understand that labels release only a small amount of physical copies (e.g. 300), I always found it 'painful' enough to be informed at the right time and willing to buy at a specific time. When people start (mis)using global marketplaces like the one in discogs it becomes even more difficult - and more expensive - to buy not-so-well-known ('underground') music. I am very much willing to support small and independent labels and paying a lot for viny releases. But I am definitely not willing to pay the liquor for people who see music just as another part of the free market and adopt the rules from there. Unfortunately, discogs is supporting this kind of behaviour.
Other then that, I think it is a great benefit for all of us.

Good article!

My records shop Vinyl Pimp is in sync with my Discogs marketplace account (Djdtl), so when you buy something on my Discogs page, it will automatically taken out on Vinyl Pimp and Vice-versa.

I am looking to licence this software later this year, as you can be a Vinyl Pimp in your own country - Taking on other people's collection and sell on their behalf. I have taken over 50,000 records this year in the last 2 years and I think it will work for any country as a low start-up and low risk business.


http://www.vinylpimp.co.uk/

discogs is currently the best possible way to sell records.

and if you do it with a little style, you'll have fun and turn stuff you don't need into decent scratch.

respect, teo.

Anyone who thinks discogs hurts records stores is crazy.

Frankly, if you are running a brick and mortar shop, you need the income from Discogs to keep the doors open. The last shop I worked in did a pretty decent trade on discogs and it really saved our bacon because we could sell to markets outside our physical territory. We specialized in dance, classic rock and hip-hop in the middle of Texas. We were the only shop in Texas(possibly the southwest) that actively stocked new and reissued Detroit and Chicago vinyl, as well as having dedicated sections for disco, italo, classic house and electro.

The majority of majority of used record sales were hip hop(under $10), cheap classic rock(stones, zep, beatles... under $10), and cheap dance(under $10 records). We would come across rare and extremely rare records and we could not sell them in the store for their value. Very few people would pay $15 for an old record, much less $150-200 for a near-minty original pressing of I'm The DJ by Z-Factor. Basically, selling high dollar records on discogs subsidized low margin areas of the business like selling new 12" dance releases.

It also helps save vinyl because people in remote areas are able to sell this stuff online instead of throwing it in a dumpster. You would be shocked by how many DJ's grew up in Bumfuck Texas, moved to a big coastal city and bought DJ records for 10 years, moved back to Bumfuck Texas, and then let their collection sit for 15 years. They can't sell the musically locally. It used to either sit in rural shops for years, or it just plain got thrown out.

I recently moved to Maine. I went to a local college radio station's record fair and cleaned house in their bins. I spend 25 bucks and walked out with about 300 bucks worth of vinyl. Later, I heard they threw all the unsold records in a dumpster. Probably 2-300 linear feet of vinyl went into a dumpster. A lot of it was barely played mint promo hip-hop and I am sure a lot of it was salable.

Nothing in the world makes me sadder than seeing records being thrown away because people can't assign any value to them. It would be hard to sell that much vinyl locally, but a dealer could have shifted a lot of that stock online over the course of a couple years.

My last point about the market is that prices on discogs have taken a dive in the last two years. The nice thing about discogs getting popular among retailers is that competition drives the prices down. Unless a records is both RARE and GOOD, it isn't going to be hard to find a copy at an attainable price. There is a ridiculous amount of good shit in NM condition out there for $5-10 and shipping. Records used to cost more on discogs because the lack of sellers created an illusion of scarcity. Now that everybody and their mom is selling there, there are usually a few copies of everything.