I would pay 100 for that Dorthy Ashby 'Rubaiyat' joint....
And you'd be at least $50 short...
Maybe a few years ago, but that record's now pretty steady at just shy of a bill.
Back when found mine, I saw it go for $325 on the Bay... wish I'd sold mine then instead of waiting until last year to trade.
Shops still put $150 on it.
Ebay is not a price guide.
A single eBay auction certainly isn't a good indicator of price, but multiple auctions taken together are evidence of what people actually
are paying for the record. What a shop asks for it doesn't establish anything unless they succeed in moving it at that price. Check popsike--six copies have sold in the past year and not one has hit a bill.
No, ebay is an entirely different market than a record shop, where you can inspect the goods prior to purchase.
I've seen Rubaiyat move twice in the last year for over $150.
There are tons of records that are either inflated or deflated on ebay. It's a ridiculous system for basing prices, unless you don't know much about records beyond what people have bought online in the past year.
There are tons of people that don't use ebay at all; it's just another place to buy records. Just because, say, A-1 puts something on a record (and it moves) doesn't make it worth that. Conversely, just because people on ebay are only paying $90 for that record doesn't mean it's worth that. For instance, Dorothy's Harp, her most common Cadet title, was regularly peaking over a bill for a while whereas the year previous it was steady at $50.
Look, your argument mostly sounds like a justification for shopping at bricks and mortar stores rather than online, and I am not at all hostile to that approach; I frequently pay in excess of the going eBay rate for a record when I can inspect it personally.
But none of this changes the fact that that record can regularly be gotten for less than a bill.
No, perhaps the nuance was lost on you but I am talking about "value" versus "price". Like lots of commodities, things are overvalued and undervalued all the time. I would actually suggest to Drewn that he buy; I think that record is underpriced online right now.
But ebay is an online marketplace where prices are determined by people all over the world who are on the internet at that moment and takes into account completely different value systems, depending on who you are: for instance Reynaldo has been paying over what records are "worth" recently. The fact that he's willing to shell out for these records doesn't change their value. There are high school kids with parents' credit cards willing to shell out tons of money for a record that they absolutely need but would you trust a 15 year old to price a record? The Japanese, French, Germans, British, etc all determine what their price is for a record on ebay, but that doesn't make it accurate.
How do any of these factors not pertain to real world record stores, though? You're telling me that clueless rich kids don't spend their parents' money at Sound Library? That French and German guys don't come to New York and go on record buying sprees? Ebay's far from a perfect market but it's a much better approximation of one than the random sampling of customers that happen to wander through a particular record store's doors; it connects people trying to unload a record with more potential buyers than any other medium.
I mean, you are arguing for the lower price either way; if it's too high you will say that it's just a $___ record, ebay is inflating it. But if it's cheaper on ebay, then you will argue that the actual value has fallen. I'm not mad at it, but that's a self-serving argument with no consistency. There's a lot more to pricing a record than what it went for on popsike, gemm, or ebay in the last 12 months.
Well, that would be a self-serving argument. But it's not my argument.
That said, I don't really blow $100 on a record on ebay too much anymore. Too many bad experiences. So that's certainly influencing my thoughts on it.
No, me neither. I hear what you are saying, but I still think most of it pertains more to how the knowledgable buyer conducts himself than it does to the market as a whole, which consists of more ignorant buyers than knowledgable ones.
