I'm slowly adding my collection of vinyl and CDs to Discogs (probably 80% done) and I noticed what my collection is supposedly worth and almost crapped my pants. I don't think my collection is really that big (maybe a couple hundred records, a few hundred CDs and a few boxsets), but I guess things really add up! I was just curious about if anyone else catalogs their stuff on Discogs and what numbers they have.

Got all of my records in discogs. Really close to your 80% total actually. Also here’s a link to my collection.

Nice, you beat me!

ah but that’s everything I got other than a box of old cheap christmas albums i kept from a collection i bought that can’t be worth more than $15 total so if you put the rest of your collection in you’ll get me.

Have to believe someone here has a collection that dwarfs ours though as like you i feel like i’ve just got a medium ish size collection. Big to someone with no albums but not to real collectors.

Just vinyl LPs entered currently (about 350):

50 cents

I don't catalog online, but I have over 800 LPs and several OOP premium boxed sets, in addition to around 500 CDs...

A rough estimate would probably be in neighborhood of $20,000 to $30,000. A lot of if it vintage, and it's all high grade. So it may be more.

I should probably catalogue it and appraise it for insurance purposes.

It worth as much as a decent meal for one. I jumped on the CD train in the day, and many years ago got rid of all the cases and inserts. I have maybe 120 LPs mostly bargain- used, and many many mp3s etc.

Grading is one thing the Discogs valuation doesn't take into consideration. You may have an album in your collection that has a median value of $100 according to Discogs, but the real value would vary widely, depending on if your album condition is G, VG+, NM, etc. I'm a stickler about condition, so most of my stuff is VG+ or better, other than some beat up KISS albums that I've had for nearly 50 years.

I've been thinking about collectible insurance as well, but I've read that determining a true value on collectibles could be a bitch, and if you suffer a loss the insurance company will likely really fight you on that. I have a decent collection of vintage toys as well, so if we ever have a fire or flood, I'd probably be fucked, insured or not.

I estimate my collection is 99% (or higher) dump bin fodder. Basically tons of vinyl and cds with a hole punched into the corner of the cover.

If the vinyl is rare enough, even cut-out copies can be worth some bucks (especially if the record itself is in great condition).

Mine are generally not in good condition.

Not in "good condition", in the sense of records with permanent non-random skips at various spots.

Initially when I first started getting audio cds, I was also skeptical about data integrity issues. For example stuff like skipping, wrong data that couldn't be corrected via reed-solomon, etc ... which caused audible "glitches".

More than I expected:

What drastically changed my mind about audio cds, was when I first discovered it was possible to read audio cd discs on a computer cdrom drive. In this sense, it was easy to check audio cd discs on the computer for manufacturing defects. (This opened up an entirely different can of worms, when I discovered via trial-and-error that reading audio cd discs has its own technical issues such as jitter.)

Before this, I only purchased music cds of titles I would listen to a lot (on auto repeat). At $20 a pop for less popular metal / punk rock titles on cd, I was not willing to do many blind buys.

That reminds me of my LPs with skips. I was only buying LPs for a few years, shifted to CDs as soon as they were a thing. But some songs I still wait for the skips in certain parts, even though I haven’t played a record in 40 years.

Yeah, it's weird how those kind of things get ingrained in your mind if you listen to them enough, even decades later.

The strangest case of an ingrained skip, was a 7" 45rpm single of Michael Jackson "Beat It". I had no idea it was a non-random skip, which did not sound "interupted" obvious to me. The skip did not "miss a beat".

It was only when I finally saw the "beat it" video on a music video show, that I realized my 7" vinyl was actually skipping. (I never saw the video for several years after it was first released),.

Estimated collection value

Based on last 30 sales
$11,146.72
Minimum
$18,605.86
Median
$33,129.31
Maximum

this is my vinyl account. Have 1 for cassettes and 1 for cds.

I'm one of the biggest SACD collectors likely on the planet. An entire library of mint Bear Family box sets. I stopped keeping count of my CD collection when it hit over 20,000 pieces years ago. Likely somewhere in the six figures, though that has declined somewhat over the past few years as streaming has changed the high-end collector's market for music.

Priceless to me and probably not worth shit to others.

Don't remind me. When I moved from the UK to the US in 1991 I literally dumped about 1,500 vinyl LPs, EPs and singles at the dump. Nobody wanted vinyl any more. Only brought over about 100 items - mostly signed and/or rarities.

Besides the quasi format war of sacd vs. dvd-audio and a dearth of desired titles I was interested in, my main reluctance to jump onto the sacd bandwagon was that there was no easy way to check for manufacturing defects using a generic dvd-rom drive back in the early-mid 2000s. (ie. Many years before the PS3 hack which could read the filesystem on sacd discs).

The few sacd discs I picked up, it turned out they were titles I didn't know initially were sacd discs. It appeared to be some type of hybrid cd/sacd disc, where the cd layer played fine on my standalone cd player.

I was browsing through the vinyl selection at Barnes & Noble the other day, and was really taken aback by the prices. Everything was in the $30-$40 range, and it just struck me that if someone wanted to get into buying records now that they'd be laying out a ridiculous amount of money to put together a collection. Just a minimal starter collection of twenty five albums would easily set one back a thousand bucks! I'm sort of used to albums being expensive, but it never really occurred to me that if I didn't already have several hundred records left over from my youth, I doubt I would have gotten into the hobby now.