Discog Analysis

Purchasing Vinyl Records

Recently, in popular culture in general, I have seen a significant increase in interest in owning vinyls as fatigue with streaming starts to set. However, I have also seen a general lack of knowledge surrounding the process and market when it comes to vinyls, myself included. To gain a better understanding, I figured taking a closer look at one particular vinyl marketplace would be beneficial. In our case, this is Discogs. We can primarily look at how vinyl condition interacts with price using this data.

Data

The data was collected by scraping the Discogs listing data. Variables that were retrieved include: artist, album, format, label, media condition, sleeve condition, and price. Both the media and sleeve condition were standardized to allow for easier comparison, I removed unnecessary text from various variables, and I converted price variables to a numeric form.

Frequencies of Media and Sleeve Condition

With these distributions, we can determine the general quality of the records for sale. In both, we see that the worse qualities, G and G+ (Good and Good Plus), are small. From this we can infer that generally most records are in the middle to high range when it comes to physical quality. Where we see a difference between the qualities of the sleeve and the media itself is in the frequency of VG and VG+ (Very Good and Very Good Plus) compared to NM (Near Mint), meaning that the distribution of quality leans higher with the sleeve in comparison to the media itself. It should also be noted, that NA is much higher among the sleeve conditions and still very common among the media conditions. This indicates that sleeve condition is more commonly left out by sellers. Generally, we can gather that while both skew towards higher quality, sleeve condition tends to have higher variability than media condition.

Comparison of Price and Media Condition

Ultimately, the quality of the media itself is core the entire experience of owning a vinyl. As such, it is necessary to have an understanding how the media condition relates to the its price. The prices can vary significantly, which necessitated using a log scale to better visualize the distributions. There is a positive correlations between increased media conditions and price, as we can see both the median and quartile markers increasing. Additionally, with regards to the distributions, we can see that the more common, higher conditions have more consistent distributions, especially compared to the G+.

Comparison of Price and Sleeve Condition

While media condition does seem to be the most important, it is worth considering the impact that sleeve condition may have, especially considering the role collection and display of vinyls plays for many potential buyers. We performed a similar log scaling to better visualize the distributions. However, we see a very different result compared to media condition. There seems to be little to no correlation between sleeve condition and price, with neither the median nor quartile markers changing much as the sleeve condition changes. This would seem to indicate that sleeve condition plays a relatively negligible role in determining price, especially in comparison with media condition.

Conclusion

The data gathered from the Discogs marketplace paints a clear picture that physical condition is a core aspect of the price of various vinyls. While both media condition and sleeve condition share a skew toward higher quality, it is the media condition rather than the sleeve condition that has the largest effect on price. A higher media condition shows a significant positive correlation with price, while sleeve condition shows little no correlation. As such, anyone looking to get into the vinyl market, specifically through Dicogs, ought to worry primarily about the quality of the media itself and can stress a little less about the quality of the sleeve.

All listing data was retrieved from Discogs, a crowdsourced database and marketplace for audio recordings.