discogs marketplace?

is this usually OK to use? looks to have a much better selection than ebay, or does anyone know of any good alternatives?

(sorry if this has been asked before, couldn't find anything when I searched?)

discogs imho is in the same league as Gemm and Musicstack--generally a slightly more esoteric selection, but the pitfalls and price-gouging remain the same. (i.e. it's a number of individual sellers and so it's dicey no matter what. I guess that's why there's a feedback system? I've never used discogs.)

i assume you're looking for vinyl? discogs is usually fine, but i wouldn't buy anything labeled below nm-, unless you've scanned the seller's profile and s/he seems like a saint

yeah just vinyl and CDs that you can no longer get elsewhere really, thanks for the warning!

i started using it a few months ago and have found it to be pretty great in general though i would agree about not buying below mint. out of about 30 purchases i've only had to deal with one person who ripped me off. i now look on discogs before ebay if looking for a record.

I was able to score a highly OOP release from overseas, and as long as you have PayPal, you're quick, and you're picky about feedback ratings, you should be fine. (same goes with Gemm and the like.)

via discogs that is. Granted, I've only bought one thing from Discogs marketplace, but it was a simple and quick transaction, especially for overseas.

+1 to discogs: they don't have Gemm's crappy UI (Gemm usually contains these impossibly long forms with checkboxes and radio selection buttons all obfuscated while you're trying to buy or sell through them.)

i buy and sell on discogs. have only had 1 bad experience with a guy who tried to charge me 10 dollars to ship a cd single from Canada.

i've shopped quite a bit on Discogs, 30+ purchases or so, and I have been satisfied in all but one. And in that instance I filed a claim through PayPal and got my money back. As long as you use PayPal you should be fine and protected, prices are high though and I don't buy anything under NM-, like everyone else here has said.

I've used it once so far without problem. There are some rare and/or hard to get things on there, but the prices seem a little over the odds a lot of the time.

lol last post on thread: http://www.discogs.com/sell/list?seller=musicberlin

Um, someone want to try and explain this to me? Also WRT his feedback rating/comments?

hahaha. so weird. just 5 seconds ago i sent my friend a link to a record that is also $1540.00. 2 days ago it was $15. something's wacky.

holy shit, so weird. it's actually the same seller. wtf

discogs allows you to bulk upload items to your marketplace account for sale via a .csv file. I guess with an inventory of 25000 items this is what that seller does and that their prices got out of whack somehow in the process.

what i cant stand about discogs is the inflexiblity of postage rates. if im ordering one white label 12, theres no way the postage will be £2.75 or £3. very fucking annoying.

should that weigh less than a non white label?

xp OK that probably explains that

titchy are you saying that's over the odds? It's not if you consider postage plus if you have to buy a mailer!

i suppose. but white labels are still cheaper than normal lps.

i do like discogs though, the offers system is good too. some of the prices people put on their records though is ridiculous (and i do wonder if they do end up getting the prices they ask for).

what i cant stand about discogs is the inflexiblity of postage rates. if im ordering one white label 12, theres no way the postage will be £2.75 or £3. very fucking annoying.

― titchy (titchyschneiderMk2), Thursday, 17 September 2009 20:36 (18 minutes ago)

Postage rates have nothing to do with discogs though, they're entirely up to the individual seller, so I'm not sure what you mean by them being inflexible. You should contact the seller if you think they're charging over the odds.

I happily both send and receive offers on prices via discogs, often the listed price is just a ball park, or best hope, or even a stab in the dark if you're the only person selling an item.

Again, if you think something's over priced then just speak to the seller. No big deal. If they don't like your offer they'll ignore it or let you know. Easy as pie.

well i mean the indvidual seller obv, yeah.

I need to get rid of lots of dance vinyl - some desirable, some considerably less so - and ebay seems like a busted flush for this kind of thing: a few tumbleweed auctions surrounded by acres of Buy It Now postings from professional retailers. Has anyone here used it for selling recently? Is it better than ebay now? Does stuff shift fairly quickly or sit around for months?

I use discogs for buying and selling fairly often. For dance vinyl, I'd say it's def better than ebay. It's really quick and simple to list items, and there are no fees unless your items actually sell, whereas Ebay charges a listing fee. I have some things on discogs that have been sitting for quite a while now, but it all depends on what you have vs. how many others are selling the same item.

Best to put them on Discogs a couple bucks below whatever is the cheapest copy if you want to move it immediately. if you're in no hurry, put it at a good price, offer a discount for multiple items in the Comments field and wait.

Good advice. Thanks. Tbh I'm more interested in offloading most of it than making big £££.

ive put some stuff around the lowest price theyre listed at on discogs but still waiting to shift them. starting to think im possibly the only person buying old grime or dubstep 12s.

what does it mean when there's a color bar to the side of a release in discogs.

there's yellow, grey and orange here http://www.discogs.com/artist/Rolling+Stones%2C+The

If you hover over them it tells you.

ah! thank you. i've been searching for hours

So, if one were selling off a few hundred records of the psych / noise / jazz / indie variety, discogs over eBay, for sure? My issue with discogs (and, for CDs, Amazon) is the fact that things sell in spurts, with no deadline. It tends to make packing records and regular trips to the post office a full time job. Any advice?

i dunno, i always buy on discogs, sell on amazon. i don't want to wait for people to stumble over what i'm trying to unload, and on average, i get really good money from ebay sales.

i think the upside (sale price) on ebay is (or can be) higher, but the ease of doing stuff on discogs might be better, depending on how much hassle you're willing to go through

Yeah, I find Discogs has rarer stuff in the first place, and then for a more reasonable price than Amazon. If what you're selling is aimed at the collectors market or folks that may not look at Amazon first, Discogs is the way to go.

Thanks!

it feels good to sell rare-ish things on ebay for +£££s to people who don't know about discogs ;)

Coincidentally they just linked to this via their Facebook page:

http://www.discogs.com/blog/339369-top-30-most-expensive-items-sold-by-month

Advice on this:

Person contacts me on Discogs about an item that I am not listing for sale, offers me a large (but not obscene) amount for it, then paypals me with his "brother-in-law's" account and wants me to ship it to his sister (he's in Europe). Obviously I'm not going to ship it to anyone other than his brother-in-law (since anything else violates PayPal's Seller TOS) but should I even do that? Is this some sort of crazy elaborate scam to get a CD single? His Discogs rating is fine... but the whole thing seems pretty suspicious.

Obviously I will not accept the payment if I don't ship him anything btw.

I would just make sure to do delivery confirmation/insurance so he can't say it never arrived and file a claim with Paypal. That's the only scam I could think of if he already paid. Unless he somehow got hold of someone else's Paypal account but that seems far fetched.

Does seem a little suspicious to have done enough business on discogs to have a rating and yet you don't have your own Paypal acct?

Thanks for being such a big part of the Discogs community. If you’re anything like us, you collect more than just music.

With that in mind, we’re developing databases for other things we collect. We want to invite you to be one of the first people to see the work that only a few collectors and Discog’s staff members have built.

To get early access to the beta, just click what you’re into below and start submitting!

Submit My First Book

Submit My First Comic

Submit My First Film

hmmmm

hmm discogs is really a good database and have often thought it would be nice to be able to look up different editions of books/comics/movies instead of just doing ebay-searches but not sure if this seems like a greedy move or an enthusiast move, also not sure if such databases/market places already exist

also, any thoughts on whether the new tax policy will be very harmful to the 2nd hand market place? (apparently Discogs will add 25% tax or something for all orders going from US to EU)

Whoa- what? Really?

It's VAT that's now payable on *fees* paid by sellers at their local rate if they are in the EU. Fees are 8% of sales prices.

So it only applies to sellers in the EU and it's nothing to do with where orders are going. I think it works out to no more than around 1.8% on the price of a record in practice. Presumably VAT registered businesses would be able to claim it back as well so no need to pass it on to customers.

I'll give Discogs credit for hooking me up with a good guy from Norway who had a Neil Young tribute LP I'd been trying to get for eight years (Everybody Knows This Is Norway. It's worth more than I was prepared to pay, so he ripped the CD, put it up on Soulseek, and I got it from him that way.

The other thing I've listed on my want-list is a Velvet Underground tribute that came out in the late '80s. I get an e-mail every few weeks saying one's up for sale, but it's always around 20 pounds, which after conversion and shipping is just way out of my buying range.

It seems to be a good place to buy from. I've only had one negative experience I can think of where a cd arrived shattered because it was sent with neither jewel case or adequate padding.
May have been others but that is the only one came to mind. Think I got a refund but not the cd I wanted.
Discogs is also a reasonably ok resource though it does have gaps. I use it frequently when EACing cds I've bought when they're not in the EAC database. Tends to have tracklisting down for main release version at least.
Gap can be in what releases are listed though.
Would be useful to have reviews of lps and individual release versions too. I think there are some reviews on site but sporadic. There is rateyourmusic I guess. But would be useful.

I actually appreciate discogs more because of the lack of reviews. Everyone on Rateyourmusic considers themselves geniuses but they're really just a slightly better class of youtube commenter.

I had someone buy from me in Argentina but wanted me to ship to his sister in Chile as you are 'not allowed' more than two foreign packages a year or some such.

So I did, and it all went fine.

JUst thinking that it would make it a full resource if people said what they thought of the lp since it could help one work out which lps by an artist were worth getting. also which pressings/releases of which lp.
BUt I guess that most people going to discogs are doing so to buy material they're already aware of. Particularly marketplace.
Just thought if it was done right it could help the experience. But not sure how 'doing it right' would be achieved anyway since I can see what johnny's saying about rateyourmusic being true at least to some extent. Ego/opinion outweighing info etc

Do wonder where you get information on the best sounding versions of things from since it doesn't seem to be fully utilised on RYM and Amazon just mixes all reviews for all releases under a title together.

Of course anyone can post reviews on there and the entire database is user populated. The process of submitting release data excludes editorialising though, which is as it should or it would never get done and.disagreements would be endless.

I like that the site still feels a bit down-home and ungentrified. Not unlike this place really. My impression is that the staff are still enthusiasts for the most part.

discogs are reviews are great, it's either:
a) old school clubbers reminiscing and being crazy hyperbolic about old school house/rave
b) a bunch of people posting "repress please?" or "you gougers should be ashamed or yourself" (hip euro "underground" deep house 12"s on small labels)
c) some person posting "the label on my copy is more periwinkle than violet and 'chuggin gasoline' is about 6 seconds longer than on the original uk chiswick issue"

BACK IN MY DAY IT WAS 6-8 WEEKS FOR ANYTHING

they wouldn't remove the feedback, so fine. i know it's not cool to post drama shit in here, but whatever this is fucking lame: https://www.discogs.com/sell/order/388755-3064

i left negative feedback in the end because that's probably going to be my last ever order. if you don't want to get cheaper orders, don't list the records. seems like common sense to me. whatever.

We aren’t able to see that, btw, you can link to your profile page if you’re trying to show the feedback.

too late. deleted my account. the guy was sending harassing messages in the dms. another perfect example of me trying my best and simply not understanding how things work. not worth it.☮

What’s their username? Now I kind of want to buy something from them just to leave nasty feedback lol

You just know there's a thread on r/discogs where the seller is like "can you believe this?"

I got this message today from someone I bought a record from, based in England.

"Hey! They charge us an amount of 40€ tax per record to send to the states. So if you still want the record we need you to pay the remaining 37€ (Discogs has manually put an amount of 3.50€ which is not correct. If you want to proceed, send us the remaining 37€ to our paypal account *******@*********.com and we will ship it tomorrow or friday :)"

This guy is trying to gouge me right. Vinyl isn't being taxed at 40 per record lmao what are we talking about

Records are not subject to the tariffs afaik and sounds like a scam to me unless you bought a £400 record

Either way, say no.

Yeah it sounds like an old-fashioned “let’s do this transaction off eBay” scam

I had a CD box set from Canada cancelled on me because tarriffs.

But CDs are and have been exempt!

My one negative feedback as a seller occured when a buyer purchased a $5 CD from me and then was personally aggrieved when I notified him that I was away from home and wouldn't be able to ship it for a week. He was so upset by the whole thing that he kept DM'ing "you're a bad seller for not taking your inventory offline" and escalated it up to getting my Discogs account cancelled.

another, totally separate seller:

"hey, thank you for the order. i didn't ship to the us for a while, but it seems like it got a lot more expensive. the cheapest way to ship the record would cost 43 EUR, so I would need another 23 EUR from you. I personally would rather cancel the order, since i don't think it makes sense to spend so much shipping on a 7 EUR record. Also Discogs and Paypal charge me 6.50 EUR fees, so I would only make 50cent for selling the record lol. I'm sorry, this was all way easier a few years ago.."

this one seems more sincere so Iam wondering if there's something crazy going on right now

Overseas shipping costs have indeed gotten outrageous the last few years. If they invoke tariffs, that’s what would make me suspicious.

xp that all makes sense, sadly

I stopped buying from the US back in Trump I, postage to the UK went insane around then.

d-40 - i would assume it's not so much "gouging" a someone clueless about international shipping who is using one of these international freight aggregators who gouge their service users by arbitrarily applying "handling charges". cancel the thing.

*not so much "gouging" AS someone...

ordered a big order from europe in october, with no expectation that it would be a speedy delivery. The tracking number I got kept showing no update. I finally emailed the seller just checking in, not angry or anything. He checked in with the shipping company who said everythings backlogged due to the shutdown.

my wantlist is an increasing number of 10 euro records which will cost me $50 to get to the united states

combined shipping maybe? but yeah it's rough out there

Yup.

we were living in a golden era and we didn’t even know it

^ truth

my wantlist is an increasing number of 10 euro records which will cost me $50 to get to the united states

― ok (D-40), Thursday, November 20, 2025 7:04 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

my wantlist is full of tons of US indie that seems exclusively held hostage by mostly German and/or Japanese sellers.

Same for me except Chicago house instead of indie (altho at least some of those appear to be German reissues which fair enough)

i'm mostly shopping for european disco 7" and 12"s that are all either worth 2 dollars or 130 dollars and are all held within their country of origin.

I should mention it's 80s / 90s indie specifically. For whatever reason rarely any US sellers have this stuff on the platform.

Shipping got too expensive for me around 2020, before that I was buying all this Discogs stuff from Germany and buying stuff from the UK through Juno, redeye, boomkat etc because shipping was usually 15 or under… shipping seemed to go up to $20 minimum around COVID/Brexit/DeJoy’s reign of terror and that’s when I checked out and basically became a pirate. I did order a bunch of stuff from Ital Tapes a couple of years ago and I think shipping was 35 bucks…

Ilium tapes wtf

ILIAN

FUCK

same experience here, and yeah, most of the stuff that pops up on my wishlist is from overseas sellers. Global shipping on Bandcamp is also discouraging: I'll go to add something to my cart and it shows like $35 for shipping to the US (and this was pre-tariffs)

spent $30 on a "VG+" record that when it arrived had highly audible noise throughout the entire record.

Seller made me send a video. I send the video. They offer me a $5 refund

what is wrong with these people

Infuriating. I bought like 3 “VG+” copies of Aja on Discogs before I gave up and bought a super clean one from a reputable seller on eBay with good photos in the listing.

ive weirdly had better luck with VG. if someone gives a VG rating they are simply not trying to scam you, 9/10

like, listen to this "VG+" https://we.tl/t-JCXCPoicE2

sounds like it needs a cleaning

it looks clean but who knows, ill wash it and see what happens

Wow yeah, that’s not VG+! I’ve had some lemons that were supposed to be VG+ also. I understand that sellers aren’t going to listen to every record, but if it doesn’t even look VG+?

well, i think that's the thing. i've seen some records look beat to crap that play awesome. and records that look pristine that sound so noisy

if you went to a used record store, and eyeballed the vinyl, which looked VG+, only to take it home and have it sound all noisy, is the record store on the hook?

Maybe if it’s bad enough?

i would say the store was on the hook if they labeled it VG+. but i'm on the hook if they had a listening station and i didn't check it out.

idk if there's really a good analogy to online selling, the whole thing depends on seller's descriptions of items. agreed that sellers can't playgrade everything. the counterweight is that for those times when they eyeball-grade something too high and it turns out to actually be trashed, they gotta offer a refund.

actual stores seem to be better at grading than random folks, in general ime, (shrugs)

most of the stores i go to don't bother to give goldmine grades since presumably the customer will check the disc before buying. doesn't mean there isn't some degree of QC, though

i do think there's a greater burden on online sellers to be exacting, since an in-person check is not possible. but in terms of a gap between how a record looks and how it sounds, to a certain extent i chalk that up to luck of the draw. not saying that sellers don't have some duty to rectify. speaking personally i want buyers to be happy with what they have but a little grace goes a long way in both directions

yeah that’s a good point. I rarely check condition in stores because i can usually tell by the price point what condition it’s going to be in, and if it’s a store I “trust” there won’t be any discs with mold, smells, food etc. I realize I am asking for a boutique experience here

this is a problem that will never be solved. buyers are always looking at a seller being greedy and overgrading. sellers will always look at the buyer owning a Crosley and generally being clueless.

can someone explain this to me?

EU General Product Safety Regulation

This item was made available in the EU or NI market prior to December 13, 2024.

This product is safe for use by the general public. No specific warnings apply. See Comments above for any additional information from the seller.

idk is it like when you buy something and it tells you that in California it gives you cancer?

yah I think so