Seeing as I buy vinyl, and now only buy vinyl – not CDs – I thought I’d post something about where I think are good places to get hold of records. If you know of anywhere else, do let me know!

One observation I’ve made about vinyl is it can be very hard to get hold of if you don’t buy it immediately upon release. While more and more musicians and labels are pressing vinyl, they still only tend to do a small run.

So, in no particular order:

1. Sister Ray (formerly Selectadisc) in Berwick Street, Soho, London

A great record shop in the Centre of London, they stock a lot of vinyl, lots of new stuff and older stuff. They also have turntables on hand if you want to sample first.

2. Boomkat

A fantastic online store. They are experts in noise / experimental stuff, but also stock beats, from dubstep to techno, to indie, hip-hop and classical. The emphasis is on cutting edge, underground and avant garde music. The great thing is they always have a good selection of vinyl and you can hear samples from every item in their music player.

You do have to order quickly if you want to secure vinyl, though, because once it goes out of stock they don’t tend to get it in again.

3. Rough Trade

Another shop I use online, rather than the physical store. Rough Trade can be the place to get that harder-to-find piece of vinyl you’ve been hunting for and they have a massive selection. The downside is their service is pretty awful; it can take weeks for something to arrive.

I managed to get a copy of Bogdan Raczynski’s “We Will Eat Your Children Too” on vinyl after they rang up and told me they thought they didn’t have it in stock but found one last copy on the floor of their van.

4. Oxfam Music shops – various towns and cities

They can have a good selection of vinyl, the one in Winchester I found recently is pretty good with a very large selection of classical and a large selection of everything else which tends to be lumped together as “rock and pop”.

The main problem with these shops which sell second hand music is that you don’t really see much vinyl after the 1980s, as sales of vinyl dropped off so steeply. So you rarely see anything from the 90s and never anything new. This is the same for other second hand record shops and car boot sales.

5. Ebay

Ebay can be the place to track down a record you’ve been looking for. I wouldn’t use it for buying new vinyl because the sellers tend to be more expensive than buying vinyl from shops or directly from labels, but for second hand stuff it is a good place to find things if you know what you are after.

The main problem with Ebay and vinyl, I have found, is that the vinyl may not quite match the description – it may be dirtier or noisier than the seller says. I normally mail the seller and ask them to be very specific, so I have some comeback if it turns out to be a duff piece of vinyl.

Of course, the upside of Ebay is that you can nearly always return an item, there is a feedback system and you are protected to some degree.

6. System Records

Specialising in a wide range of music, lots available on vinyl. One good thing about this site is that you can pay by PayPal!

7. Newt Records

Another online record store which seems to have some of the vinyl other shops do not!

8. Hard to Find Records

My wife surprised me by buying me Amon Tobin’s “Out From Out Where” on vinyl from this online store. We were a little surprised to find one of the pieces of vinyl was not in a sleeve, but then we realised they sell second hand as well as new vinyl. Although the sleeve was missing, the vinyl was absolutely mint, so I was happy (should have bought it on vinyl to start with!)

They seem to specialise more in electronic and dance music but do check them out.

9. Amazon

You can often find weird and wonderful CDs from their Marketplace Sellers and sometimes you can do the same with vinyl. Amazon themselves are rubbish for vinyl, but because they have this Marketplace Seller network it makes it very easy to automatically search all these sellers.

10. Direct from the label

Actually buying direct from the record label is often cheap and easy; I’m talking about the smaller independent labels here.

Labels like Ninja Tune, Domino, Warp, Southern, Secretly Canadian – you can buy from these and many, many more, directly.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2007 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.