How it started

Buying used records online is bad.

So I've been collecting records since my days as a music director at a college radio station. It's fun, addicting, you meet wild people. That thrill quickly dissolves when buying online. I build online stores for a living, which makes buying records online especially hard to endure. Shops don't prioritize listing single used records... and I get it, it's a lot of work for a single copy. The ones that do leave the pressing a mystery and don't separate their online inventory — so a record up for sale may have sold at the counter weeks ago. Happens all the time!

So this site is my attempt at fixing that or at least injecting something else into the ether. Not to mention that somehow Vancouver has no dedicated online shop for used records at all.

The house always wins...

At first I actually built an app that monitors 20+ record stores across Canada and pulls their fresh listings, then parses all the data and uses a self-learning algorithm to match each used listing to its exact pressing — the specific run of the record, with its own market value.

It taught me something I didn't expect. Stores almost never tell you which pressing you're buying, but their prices follow its market value closely. So they've done the homework — they just keep the answer to themselves. And I get why: if you can't tell which pressing it is, you might make a gamble thinking it could be the rare one and you got one. The data actually says you almost never do.

Want to dig with it? Talk to me →
The house always wins...
The search app — every listing, matched to its pressing (note the delta)PTT, Pull the Trigger

Why not share everything with you?

You deserve better my brothers! Every record here is identified to its exact pressing and all of its market data. They are priced according to the averages, showing what copies have actually sold for and what sellers are asking now. The goal is to end up (on average) about 10% under the going market value.

You shouldn't have to open multiple tabs, everything you need to make a decision is right here in front of you!

One record. Less than a minute to publish!

There's a simple reason store bins rarely make it online: listing one used record means photographing, identifying, grading, describing and pricing something that sells exactly once. It can take the better part of an hour, and nobody has that hour times a wall of crates.

Since the collection was already catalogued on Discogs on acquisition — I built a desk that pulls everything the pressing already knows into the store: photos, audio, credits, tracklist, market history. It drafts the description and suggests a price for the copy's condition, always under the median. Listing a record now takes seconds and this whole shop runs through it!

Run a store? Ask about licensing →
One record. Less than a minute to publish!
the desk — look up, grade, describe, pushpush ▸ store
The Takeaway

Okay, nice. Now what?

Obviously I am taking a little haircut here by undercutting and not using these tactics. But it helps meet other collectors, service the city, and hopefully raise the standards to make it just as interesting to engage online as it is in the physical space.

For me it all goes back to my last project. Before all of this I ran Leisure, a little ticketing platform for Vancouver's alternative and underground shows while charging a fair fee to the user. COVID closed the spaces and the platform went with them. So this is the next thing to follow.

Here is an old video of the platform, just to catalogue this nostalgia.

More Questions? Get at me →
leisure.mp4admit one