Discogs uses the Goldmine standard for record rating. This ties into that last paragraph: You should re-examine every record you are selling on Discogs, and determine its quality. Do: Price Competitively, Grade Conservatively But because I just trusted my older self, I sold that record as the black version, and a dude named Jerry in Oregon got a discounted color record. I didn’t it was a color version worth at least $20 more than the black version. This can also work against you in a different way: I sold a compilation I listened to only once three years ago, and when I put that record in my Discogs, I noted that I had the black version. If your record doesn’t have that, check the dead wax and the catalog number (this is on the spine), and if that doesn’t work, keep that record on your shelf, because it’s probably not worth trying to sell in a giant online marketplace for a few bucks anyway. Start with the album’s UPC, which will solve roughly 70 percent of “Which version do I own?” questions, and you can even use Discogs’ app to scan that UPC. If you’re not judicious in this, this is how you can get in trouble on Discogs, and be blacklisted from the site and have strangers from across the country/world wanting to choke you. The difference between pressings, color variants and cover variants can make your record worth $10s of dollars more or less than other versions. This part seems obvious, but this is the part where your money is mostly made or lost. Do: Make Sure You Know Exactly Which Version Of A Record You Have This is for all those records you don’t actively love, and we all love Vinyl Me, Please records. You, like me, will go to our graves clutching our copies of Vinyl Me, Please’s Big Smoke exclusive. And as a special note: I am not advocating selling your Vinyl Me, Please records, even if they are very valuable. This is what I’ve learned in my six months, and with my perfect 23 five-star rated profile on Discogs, you know you can trust me. So, here’s a guide to selling your records on Discogs, written by someone who is inexperienced at doing so. The point is most of these guides felt like they were for people who make their living flipping records, and you and I are not one of those people: We just want a little cheddar for some records we don’t listen to as much as we should, and which someone else might get more use out of than us. Because when I started selling on Discogs, I checked out other sites’ guides for selling on Discogs, and all of them got super granular into postage rates, and matrix runouts, and grading record jacket fibers, and when it’s appropriate to charge customs fees and to call Interpol when you think a record might contain human remains, or whatever. But what you might care about is how I raised that money. This isn’t really a spoiler alert because you probably don’t care, but, I was able to finance every single dollar of a trip to New Orleans for me and my wife, to the point where the bag of chips we bought in the airport when we were leaving cleared out my slush fund. Then, it dawned on me: I’d determine which records in my 1,700+ record collection I could do without, and then sell them on Discogs, the online record marketplace juggernaut. Being a music writer leaves you with very few transferable skills as far as “side hustles” go, and I needed to raise these funds in secret, which meant that I couldn’t drive for Lyft or Grubhub at night with our shared car. While that commonly Millennial situation is successful in killing off Applebee’s, it left me with a conundrum. While I am paid well for my work here at VMP Midwest HQ - I have enough money to pay rent, buy food for myself and my dumb dog, pay off my considerable credit card debt (shout out to years working retail for $8.50 an hour) and my wife’s student debt - I don’t have much by way of disposable income (shout out to my wife for having us on monthly “allowances” to pay off that debt). It was a genius idea, and I had 5 months to plan it, but here was the question: How would I pay for it? I hatched a plan: I’d surprise my wife with a trip to New Orleans - an American city we’d never been to - for an all expenses Dirty Thirty trip (we mostly went to restaurants and museums). In January, my wife turned 30, and without going too far into it, we both could really use an excuse to get away from it all. It’s a story that starts like most in our post-capitalist terrorscape: I needed more money.
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