5 Records Your Dad Might Have That Are Worth MAJOR Money.
What goes around comes around, and we don’t just mean records on a turntable. Audiophiles swear by the sound quality of vinyl over CDs, MP3s, and other files, and now younger generations are starting to see the light. Vinyl sales continue to increase each year as CD sales drop, which means that more and more young people are borrowing albums from their parents or buying their own, while those who grew up with them are perhaps dusting off their cherished collections. New records are typically more expensive than other formats, but fans would argue that the listening experience and ability to hold the music in your hands is worth the premium. There is also a culture of collecting that comes with switching to vinyl that could pay off big time, if you know what you have or what to look for. First pressings by big acts like The Beatles or Bruce Springsteen, and finds like misprints and pressings with alternate covers, can greatly increase the value of vinyl if the copies are kept in pristine condition. Before you dig through those crates to listen to your favorite throwback LP or 45-RPM single, make sure that what you’re holding isn’t worth a full semester of college. Here are some records that you may have (or used to have) that are worth way more than their original sticker price.
Collector John Marshall of moneymusic.com once told Los Angeles radio station K-Earth that Springsteen’s first release with Columbia Records can fetch as much as $5000. Discogs lists “never” as the last time a copy was sold on the website, but if you found and held onto a copy, you could be the first.
The original “butcher” cover of this record was not well-received, so Capitol Records spent $250,000 recalling the 750,000 copies that had already been shipped to stores. The covers were changed, but as with most recalls, some of the original copies remained out in the world and have been sold for as much as $15,300. If you unknowingly inherited one of those strays, it’s time to cash in.
Between 300 and 1000 copies of this jazz record were released in 1957, and there is one small change that makes them more valuable than other records from the label. According to The Vinyl Factory, the rumor is that Blue Note ran out of labels halfway through the first pressing of the album. The standard address for the record label is 47 West 63rd NYC, but some of the records have labels that say 47 West 63rd New York 23 on one side. There is some debate about the value though, as one record that did not have the special label still sold for over $10,000 on eBay.
As the story goes, English punk rock band the Sex Pistols were signed in early March 1977 by A&M Records, and then famously dropped from the label only six days later because of their behavior. When it decided to cut ties with the band, the record company had already pressed 25,000 copies of their single “God Save the Queen.” The order was given for the records to be destroyed, but over the past 39 years, nine copies have surfaced and have sold for upward of $8600. No one knows how many copies are still unaccounted for, but someone surely has to have one.
The Beatles’s self-titled double album (which later became known as the White Album) originally released in 1968, but not all copies were created equal. The members of the band and executives at the studio were given copies stamped with serial numbers that began with A00000, each in consecutive order (A000001, A000002, etc.). The very first copy, which Clifford J. Yamasaki of Let It Be Records purchased from an executive at Capitol Records in the 1970s, sold in 2013 for $35,000, a year after the copy with serial number A0000023 sold at auction for $13,750. The odds that you once owned a copy of the album that had a low serial number are slim to none, but not impossible.
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