My records. Your turn!

First I built an app. It watches 20-odd record stores across Canada, pulls their new listings and matches each one to its exact pressing. The specific run, with its own going rate.

It taught me something I didn't expect. Stores almost never tell you which pressing you're buying. But their prices follow it closely. They did the homework and kept the answer. I get why. If you can't tell which pressing it is, you might gamble that you landed the rare one. The numbers say you almost never do.

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. That's most of an hour. Nobody has that hour times a wall of crates.

My collection was already catalogued on Discogs. So I built a desk that pulls what the pressing already knows straight into the shop. Photos, audio, credits, tracklist, what it has sold for. It drafts the description and suggests a price for the copy's condition, always under the median. A record now takes seconds. The whole shop runs through it.

I take a haircut by pricing under the going rate. Whatever. It gets me talking to other collectors, it serves the city, and it might even the bar. Buying online should be as good as flipping through a bin.

Before this I used to run Leisure, a little online ticketing platform for Vancouver's underground shows at a fair fee. Quarantini closed the rooms and took the platform with them. This is the next thing.

Here's an old video of it, just to file the nostalgia.