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Unloading A Cubic Buttload: thoughts/advice/interest?

prof_rockwellprof_rockwell 2,867 Posts
edited October 2012 in Strut Central
Long time no post, and a question for the Strut. Backstory:

Been in NYC for 12 years now, and it looks like I'm here for the long haul (married and working on an addition ;) ) Now, I got the majority of my vinyl in storage back in Cali, and I'm going to be out there for a week in mid-November and am looking to unload the majority of it and ship back a very small portion of it to keep in my permanent collection (5 Expedit partitions at the most). The idea is to close out my storage altogether because if I haven't even really thought about it in 12 years, I'm not going to miss it if it's gone. Plus I can cut out the expense of paying to store it.

Moms sent me a newspaper ad from Amoeba showing that they buy large collections and will even come and pick up. That's looking real tempting as I'm only going to be there for about 5 days or so. Buuut...I've also searched the forums and read all the good feedback on discogs vs. ebay, as well as manny's post back in May when he was selling off a chunk of his collection as well.

Now, I'm not opposed to shaving off a couple hundred of the gems and selling those piecemeal, but just wanted to see what folks thought on that. Should I just say fuck it and let Amoeba take it? Or are there other dealers/shops that might be interested in buying a collection?

Some info:

upwards of 3,000+
variety of LP, 12" and 45s
mostly hip hop, but as with any one who was playing out regularly and doing some minimal production/performance it has all the usual fare that goes along with that
I'm thinking of sifting out common/dollar bin stuff and just dropping it off at a Salvation Army or some such

Thanks!

  Comments

  • The_NonThe_Non 5,691 Posts
    Skim out the random rapz & what you want and sell the rest to Amoeba
    PS How much is a cubic buttload? Can you convert it into approx. square craploads?
  • hcrinkhcrink 8,729 Posts
    Just be prepared for Amoeba to pay like $1.99 a foot and not know or care if there's anything cool. Assuming this is either LA or the bay so there's gotta be some better options to explore.
  • DJ_EnkiDJ_Enki 6,475 Posts
    I thought this was going to be an ill-advised attempt at a poop thread.
  • BurnsBurns 2,227 Posts
    Promote a one day record buy from your storage bin 10 to 4, on craigslist/forums/facebook, let the kids in and win, and let them score some goods for cheap, then dump the rest onto the record shops. I'll think you could make more in a swap sell then flipping it all to a shop.
  • empanadamnempanadamn 1,462 Posts
    N*****!!! How you been, buddy?! Hope you're well.
  • mannybolonemannybolone Los Angeles, CA 15,025 Posts
    Rockwell: I was and still face a very similar process and here's what i've done so far.

    I skimmed off the random rap shit that I could flip for at least $20 and up. That yielded - much to my astonishment, somewhere around $6000-7000 worth of sales from...maybe 100 or fewer records? Blew my mind. Discogs baby, discogs.

    That left me with somewhere around 2000-2500 records left. I mean, all said, it barely made a dent. Couldn't complain about the money though!

    I then invited two different people to come through for private sales and sold off an additional 700 or so records for about $1200. Again, the money was nice but that still means I have close to 2K left. I've been too busy/lazy to do a few more private sales and folks here actually dissuaded me from going the record show route. Frankly, at this point, if someone offered me around $3K for what was left, I'd take 'em up on it. I'd probalby be leaving around $1K on the table but the time it would save would be immense. I just don't know how realistic that would be, especially given the market for hip-hop 12"s at this point. If Amoeba came and offered me a quarter of that, I'd be surprised and I probably would balk.
  • prof_rockwellprof_rockwell 2,867 Posts
    empanadamn said:
    N*****!!! How you been, buddy?! Hope you're well.
    Doing good man, enjoying married life, and hopefully will soon be enjoying be a daddy.

    mannybolone said:
    Rockwell: I was and still face a very similar process and here's what i've done so far.

    I skimmed off the random rap shit that I could flip for at least $20 and up. That yielded - much to my astonishment, somewhere around $6000-7000 worth of sales from...maybe 100 or fewer records? Blew my mind. Discogs baby, discogs.

    That left me with somewhere around 2000-2500 records left. I mean, all said, it barely made a dent. Couldn't complain about the money though!

    I then invited two different people to come through for private sales and sold off an additional 700 or so records for about $1200. Again, the money was nice but that still means I have close to 2K left. I've been too busy/lazy to do a few more private sales and folks here actually dissuaded me from going the record show route. Frankly, at this point, if someone offered me around $3K for what was left, I'd take 'em up on it. I'd probalby be leaving around $1K on the table but the time it would save would be immense. I just don't know how realistic that would be, especially given the market for hip-hop 12"s at this point. If Amoeba came and offered me a quarter of that, I'd be surprised and I probably would balk.

    Thanks manny. Speaking of current market for hip-hop 12"s, what is that looking like? I haven't done any major ebaying since 2008, and it was OK to pretty good.
  • RAJRAJ tenacious local 7,782 Posts


    How I made $10k in one day with Facebook Ads (re: bots)

    In light of the speculation about bots on Facebook, and tech journalists who have resorted to trolling Hacker News for stories, I???d like to share a story about how Facebook ads brought real human beings to my house at 9 AM on a Saturday to spend real money.

    Before I started working in tech, I founded and ran a business selling vintage vinyl records. It was fun, but the records were piling up in storage at my folks??? place (thanks for your patience, mom!) and I needed to get rid of all these records that were piling up.

    I created a Facebook Event, shared it on Facebook, and spun up a few ads for it targeting people who liked other record-related Pages on Facebook. The ads looked like this:



    Took about a half hour. Three weeks and $150 later, there were 341 people ???attending???, and 104 ???maybes???. I???d run Event Ads before, but I was skeptical - we???re these all real people who had not just clicked on the ad, but would actually show up at 9 AM on a Saturday?

    They were. Saturday morning, there was a huge line of people in front of my house. They kind of looked like zombies (I mean, Saturday mornings can be rough), but I can attest that they were definitely not bots. For the next five hours, the scene looked kind of like this:



    At the end of the day, hundreds of happy customers later, I counted $10,000 in cash (and some payments accepted via Square - yes, I???m reporting the income, IRS). Over 3000 records sold in one afternoon. The majority of my customers came from Facebook Ads, so what is the calculated ROI, 2000%? 3000%? You do the math.

    No optimization, no professional consultant, no special relationship with an account manager. As far as I???m concerned, clicks coming from Facebook are the realest clicks in the game right now. Need to track them on your site, Limited Pressing? That???s what UTM tags and Mixpanel are for, dude.

    Argue over bots and javascript tracking on HN all you want - I???m busy growing another business. Actually, we???ve been thinking about running a few ads???wonder which platform we???ll choose???
  • prof_rockwellprof_rockwell 2,867 Posts
    ^^^Holee shite! That's serious biznizz. I wonder how successful that could be for me since I'm not an ex-dealer and the condition of my collection probably varies a lot more than his did? I'm only going to be in town from Mon-Sat, but I could pull off a yard sale like this since I'm taking the red-eye out of SFO.

    Hmmm....
  • LaserWolfLaserWolf Portland Oregon 11,517 Posts
    He did $3 each.
    You do $1 each.

    What is HC? as in "Argue over bots and javascript tracking on HN all you want".
  • prof_rockwellprof_rockwell 2,867 Posts
    LaserWolf said:
    He did $3 each.
    You do $1 each.

    What is HC? as in "Argue over bots and javascript tracking on HN all you want".

    Yeah, I was thinking of doing a couple of tiers: $1, $3, etc or buy 3 for $5. Something like that.

    HN google-fu turned up Hacker News

    http://news.ycombinator.com/
  • mannybolonemannybolone Los Angeles, CA 15,025 Posts
    Brendon was selling off multi genre items though, not just hip-hop 12"s. I think your mileage would greatly vary from his since what he had to offer was a lot more diverse.

    I also think, just for expediency, the method works best when you sell at one flat price. Variable pricing is likely to make things more complicated if you're dealing with a throng of people coming through and there's also the work you need to do in order to price the shit to begin with.

    When I did single person private sales, I priced as they pulled, basically creating $1, 2, 3 (etc.) piles. They were free to put back anything they didn't want post-pricing though that didn't happen in either sale.

    In the end, it still comes back to speed. I think you or I could probably do decently with a $1/sale but you'd potentially (it depends on your stock) be leaving money on the table in the hundreds. Maybe that'd be worth it though in order to be done with it in one fell swoop.
  • prof_rockwellprof_rockwell 2,867 Posts
    Yeah, those are all good points, manny. It's also about 50 miles outside of the Bay Area, which is where the majority of my 'target demographic' would be located, so getting folks to make the trek is questionable as well.

    I'm already resigned that I won't be making as much money on this if I did it properly through discogs/ebay/etc, but then again, I won't have the expense of paying storage fees for stuff I'm not using/haven't looked at in 12 years anymore either.
  • LaserWolfLaserWolf Portland Oregon 11,517 Posts
    Never put records in storage.
  • mannybolonemannybolone Los Angeles, CA 15,025 Posts
    LaserWolf said:
    Never put records in storage.

    Otherwise, you might see this guy pointing at your records and saying, "that's a 6 dollar bill, right there!"

  • HorseleechHorseleech 3,830 Posts
    LaserWolf said:
    Never put records in storage.

    99% of the time it's a one-way trip.
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