Crate digging in a digital world.

The best sites to find vintage vinyl records online.

Part of the joy of being a vintage vinyl collector is leafing through crates at your local used-record shop. It’s usually musty and the displays seem to have been created to challenge you more than to help you find stuff. But, man, when you come across that pressing you’ve been digging for the rush of satisfaction is gold. Or platinum depending on sales of the LP.

Hunting for wax online can be much the same experience. Each site has its own set of filters to learn and get accustom too. Many of the sites lack design and can feel a little out of date. Stuck in time. Kinda like your local record shop.

So let’s have a look at some of the better sites to find vintage vinyl on the web. After all, just because you’re partial to a format that predates i-anything, it doesn’t mean you dismiss all things binary. While online market places shouldn’t replace a visit to your local vintage vinyl shop, there are plenty out there with a lot to offer both beginner and seasoned collectors.

But where to start? Like the wrinkles on Keith Richard’s face, the choice of vintage vinyl record stores online can be overwhelming. So let’s take a look at some of the most popular sites and what they have to offer.

The best offer knowledge on discs even if they don’t have the inventory at the moment. Sites that offer recently-sold prices are great to help you judge the market and value of items.

Rule number 1, spread the love. Just as you wouldn’t spend your entire time hunting for vintage vinyl in one local record shop, you shouldn’t focus all you efforts at one online market place. The following sites all have something to offer. And you never know where that disc with that song will show up.

All these sites have their merits and special something.

Discogs is a major player in the vintage vinyl world. It’s where I would send first time or beginner collectors. The site’s about page totes that they are on a mission to become the world’s biggest music marketplace and database with millions of titles. The selection and information on Discogs is indeed impressive. Navigating through all the site has to offer can be a little challenging, but don’t give up. This is after all the vintage vinyl experience.

With a little digital digging, you’ll find a wealth of information including product descriptions, relevancy and pictures.

Search filters include by genre, style, decade, format and country. Searching can be a little complicated as they will show you albums that are not currently available at the moment. Be sure to distinguish between marketplace and explore tabs. For much sought after pieces they even provide information on how to distinguish a fake from the real deal.

You’ll also find highest and lowest recent-purchase prices giving you an idea of what the market is like.

A general rule is the more important the piece, and expensive, the more information you’ll find. Discogs offers notes on the album and what to look for to guage authenticity and value. For important pieces, you’ll also find notes on an LP’s unique elements and idiosyncracies. This includes condition of the vinyl, what to look for in listings and what makes a pressing rare.

Pictures are available but check to see it they are specific to the album you are thinking about buying.

Over all, if you are a beginner or seasoned collector, Discogs is a great place to find information on a vast range of vintage vinyl.

You have to register to use the site, but this is par for the course.

Run by ex-record exec and music writer Jeff Gold, RecordMecca has an impressive pedigree. Included with a large selection of rare vinyl, the site offers a wide range of music memorabilia.

This is one of the best all around vintage vinyl sites for collectors. Navigation is good with tabs allowing you to focus your search. Drop down menus include rare, new arrivals and museum quality funnels. It is also one of the better looking vintage vinyl sites you’ll find.

Product descriptions are adequate although uneven, a lot of pieces we browsed rarely expanded beyond acronyms of G or VG+.

Explanations of the historical relevancy of choice pieces on the other hand are on point. The Beatles 3rd State ‘Yesterday and Today’ Butcher Cover LP we found had a generous write up offering collectors a great idea of what they were looking at.

Pictures of items offer a look at covers, labels and album conditions. Not everything on the site, however, has all of the above. Many of the vinyl we browsed had no product description, historical notes or pictures.

The site does offer piece of mind with a guarantee of authenticity on purchases with no time limit.

To purchase anything you’ll need to sign up with an email. A work around is to buy through their eBay auction site.

MusicStack is a marketplace dedicated to hooking collectors up with independent record sellers and stores from around the world. The claim is that you are searching over a 1000 record stores worldwide. This is great because there is a lot of volume, but with the volume comes a lot of ordinary records to sift through.

The site is fairly easy to navigate. There is an okay shop filter, but depending on the record there is not always pictures. Detailed descriptions and info on the relevancy of items also varies. It helps to know what you are looking for on MusicStack.

This is not the prettiest site. But the search engines get the job done and then some.

Product descriptions rarely go beyond the bare minimum. For historical relevancy it’s best to search artist where you’ll find an overview of their discography including a list of known releases. Depending on the artist this can go pretty deep. Elvis has 28 pages of releases.

We liked searching by artist. An interesting feature you find when doing so is the Price Guide tab which gives you stats on an artist’s discography. You can break it down by discography or album title. You’ll find graphs with sale stats on format, year and price. It’ll help give you an understanding of the marketplace and what an LP is worth. Sellers are rated which is always helpful.

Best for intermediate to experience collectors.

Call us superficial but the thing we like least about RareRecords.net is the design, particularly the logo. Help my head has been turned in to a b-side. But once you get past this, the user experience is quite good and the information you’ll find is generous and on point.

Run by Charlie Essmeier a long time collector and record dealer. The site has been around since 2013.

Product descriptions are generous and often include historical background on the relevance of the record you are looking at. You’ll also find photos of covers, sleeves and disc wholes to help you judge an LP’s condition. You can search by a specific title or artist or search by category with a drop down that includes prices, era, genre and Beatles.

Gotta love me do a site that has Beatles as a category.

There’s a Recently Sold tab that gives you an idea of the market and what certain vinyls are commanding.

One of the things we like best about RareRecords.net is that you sense from the writing on the site that this is created by true music fans. Respect Mr. Essmeier.

Finally you get reassurance with all items returnable in original condition within 14 days. Original condition? Vintage vinyl? Is this a trap? Get it back to them in the condition you received it and you’ll be good.

Headquartered in France, CD and LP positions itself as an international market place for buyers and sellers. The site is functional and easy to use.

Everything is pretty basic however. This includes product selection.

There are photos, but note whether they are for illustration purposes or of the actual piece you are looking at. Product descriptions are weak in our opinion. There is little to no historical relevancy on the LPs. It’s mostly what the sellers choose to offer. Most of which is sparse bullet points similar to an eBay product description.

As the name suggests this is a CD and Vinyl marketplace. Search filter options include by genre, price, format and seller. The site does a good job of hooking up buyers and sellers. Buyers are going to need to do their homework however. Information on the rarity and uniqueness of pieces are limited.

If you haven’t heard of eBay, congrats. You are one serious analogue purists.

The ubiquitous online marketplace offers a large selection of new and used vinyl. As with everything on the site the sellers are rated to provide reassurances. Perhaps most attractive is the slick eBay experience. Great filters. Shop by price, genre, artist and pressing. Gaurantees vary from seller to seller. This is anything, but a quaint mom and pop experience. What you gain in familiarity, you loose in folksy.

Of course don’t let all these online sellers stop you from experiencing digging for vintage vinyl at a local record store. Which brings us to an oddball on the list. A part of the Discogs network, Vinylhub is the world’s biggest community-built database of brick and mortar record stores. Vinylhub allows you to discover and contribute the location of record stores around the world.

Just scratching the surface of, hopefully, unscratched vinyl.

Of course this list is by no means exhaustive. The joy of crate digging is that you never know when the opportunity will present itself. Around the next corner or the next garage sale. The digital world is no different. Facebook’s market place has become this 24-hour, 7-day-a-week garage sale. You never know what you are going to bump in to. The sites above are the ones we like and have found useful. If you know of any that you think we should check out, let us know. Or maybe you want to keep your dusty goldmine to yourself.