The music industry has grown, but the way music is delivered has shrunk over the years. People with vintage album collections who want to sell LPs online can do it themselves or enlist the help of dealers, who can make the process much easier and still quite profitable. Resellers know how to price records and have more experience selling them online than the average person.

But before you take your drives to a reseller and think you’re going to make a lot of money, consider a few things. First, what state are your albums in? While most people today don’t own turntables, there are plenty who still do, and they’re not going to pay a lot for scratched-and-played albums. You don’t want to try to sell damaged LP.

On the other hand, if you’ve kept your albums in decent to excellent condition, you have the kind of albums people want to buy. Many collectors, thinking of the future, bought albums 20, 30, 40 years ago and never even opened them. These people sell LPs online, by themselves or through dealers, and often get paid a lot of money for them.

Another thing to consider is who are the artists and what are the songs on your albums. This will affect the price. Vague artists or bands that almost no one heard of “in the past” and no one knows today will not bring a high price. However, if you have albums in your collection that were (and maybe still are) popular and contain songs that were once hits, you’re in a better position to make more money when you sell LPs online.

One of the advantages of selling your music to a reseller rather than directly over the Internet is that the reseller will have experience and know the value of your records. When you sell LP on your own, what will you use to determine the price? You’ll likely either raise the price, in which case you won’t sell much, or raise the price and let the discs go for a fraction of what you could have gotten for them.

As with any collectible, dealers can look at two similar albums and immediately know that there is a huge difference in value between them. Inexperienced people who want to sell LP online are usually unaware of this difference.

In short, just because you can’t play your discs anymore doesn’t mean others can’t. If you want to sell them and make some money, a qualified dealer/reseller can help you and also give you a fair price that you might not get if you sell LP on your own.