What do you buy?

For starters, we only buy vinyl albums, cassettes and CD’s, no 78’s or 8-tracks. Because we are not a traditional record store, we are a little more picky about the kinds of things we carry. Genres we are always looking for are:

• Punk / Metal / New Wave

• Rock and Psychedelic, especially from the 60’s-80’s (ie: Pink Floyd, Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, etc)

• Weird, Obscure, Avant Garde. (ie: Captain Beefheart, Weird Al, Neu!, Dr. Demento, etc)

• Jazz (esp: early pressing Blue Note, especially Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Nina Simone, etc)

• Soul / Funk / R&B

• Blues (Robert Johnson, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy Waters, Son House, etc)

• Rap / Hip-Hop LP’s

Things we’re less interested in/take on a case-by case basis

• Easy Listening (Sinatra, etc)

• Maxi Singles

• Soft Rock (James Taylor, Seals & Croft, etc)

• Classical

How much are my records worth?

• There’s no quick answer to this question. Obviously, the better condition the sleeves and records themselves are in, the more likely we’ll want them. That said, a lot of factors go into value. For example, your Beatles records will probably not fetch you a lot of money— remember their popularity means they had millions of copies pressed, which in turn means they’re not usually particularly rare. That doesn’t mean we don’t want them, but unless they’re original pressings in great shape, they probably only retail for about $10-15 each (which means we’ll pay between $3-7 for them)..

• That said, for really desirable stuff that’s in good shape (think :no water damage, covers intact, records in VG to VG+ condition) we typically pay out about 30-40% of retail (usually the lower end if we need to clean and re-bag records, and the higher end if the records come with paper sleeves and poly bags). If we need to do a lot of cleaning (records are very moldy or dusty, have been stored improperly and have dirty covers, generally the stuff you’d see doing a house clean out of someone’s basement etc), we pay out around 20-25% of retail. Basically, the less work we have to do to make the collection sellable, the more we can offer you.

How big of a collection will you buy?

We’ll gladly look at any collection from a small handful to a full room worth of boxes. That said, if you would like us to look at more than 50 or so at a time, we ask that you give us a call. We have a small staff and only one dedicated record buyer, so it takes us a little while. That said….
 

How long will it take for you to evaluate my collection?

The longer you can give us with your collection, the more we can usually offer you. We pride ourselves on offering a fair percentage of what we can resell them for, utilizing a few different online databases to figure out the value. We can occasionally appraise smaller collections on the spot but ask that you call first as we only appraise Monday-Fridays. For anything over roughly a crate of records, we will generally check in your collection and send you home with an intake receipt - it usually takes our buyer anywhere between 24 hours to a couple of days to appraise a collection depending on the size. We currently only have one buyer/appraiser, so giving a heads up that you’re thinking of coming in with some stuff is always appreciated.

Will you come to my house?

Again, we are primarily only 1 buyer, so we can not make house calls during business hours, but can usually accommodate coming out before or after, especially for a larger collection. Call us!

You can also email us at commonbeatmusic@gmail.com with a short list of artists you have if you’d like to see if you have things we are interested in before making the trip!