78 RPM Records Value: What Old Shellac Is Worth

Most 78 rpm records are worth very little, because they were the standard format for half a century and were produced in enormous quantities. In the United States 78s dominated until the summer of 1958, and they continued into the late 1960s in some countries. Vinyl arrived in 1948 and had become standard by 1958, replacing shellac.

The format explains the quantity. A 10-inch 78 holds only three to five minutes a side, and a 12-inch four to five, so a pre-war "album" was a bound book of several discs. Popular singers, dance bands, marches, light classical and novelty records filled those books by the million.

The exceptions are almost entirely records made in small numbers for small markets: country blues, gospel and what the industry at the time called race records, issued by labels that often did not survive the Depression. Those are the 78s worth stopping for, and they are identified by the label, not by the year.

Two documented cases show what the top of this market looks like.

Skip James, "Devil Got My Woman", Paramount, 1931. Only three copies of the original 78 are known to exist, and only one of the three is in playable condition. That is scarcity on a scale that the vinyl market almost never reaches.

Black Patti 8030, "Original Stack O'Lee Blues" by Long Cleve Reed and Little Harvey Hull. The collector Joe Bussard found it in 1966 in a box of fifteen 78s under a bed, and paid ten dollars for the lot. Oxford American reported in 2014 that after word got out, offers climbed from ten thousand dollars to fifty thousand, and Bussard refused all of them. At the time it was the only known copy in the world, though another was later said to have surfaced in California.

Black Patti itself is the point. Founded in Chicago in 1927 by Mayo Williams, who had produced race records at Paramount, the label lasted seven months and issued 55 records in total, pressed at Gennett in Richmond, Indiana. A label that existed for seven months cannot have produced many surviving discs — and that, not the age, is what makes its records valuable.

Sort by label first, because the label is the fastest signal of scarcity.

• Set aside anything on a label you do not recognise. Short-lived regional labels are where the value is. Paramount and Black Patti are the famous examples, but there were dozens.
• Set aside blues, gospel, jazz and early country. The collector demand is concentrated in these, and it is not evenly spread across a decade — a Victor dance band record from 1928 and a Paramount country blues record from 1928 are completely different propositions.
• Put Victor, Columbia, Decca and Brunswick popular releases in the common pile. These are the ones that were made in their millions.
• Read the matrix number. On 78s the two sides often carry numbers that are not consecutive, because they were assigned when the songs were recorded rather than when the record was assembled. A large gap between the two numbers means the sides were recorded at different times.

The Goldmine scale applies to 78s as it does to any other record, and the published multipliers are the same: Very Good Plus is generally about 50 per cent of Near Mint, Very Good no more than 25 per cent, Good and Good Plus 10 to 15 per cent, and Poor or Fair 0 to 5 per cent.

But the realistic expectation is lower. Goldmine estimates that no more than 2 to 4 per cent of records surviving from the 1950s and 1960s are genuinely Near Mint, and 78s are older, more brittle and were played with steel needles that wore the groove on every pass.

Grade under a strong light held at a low angle. Look for hairline cracks radiating from the spindle hole, chips at the edge, grey grooves where the shellac filler has worn, and warping from heat. Check the sleeve too, though many 78s now sit in plain replacement sleeves — Discogs calls these generic, meaning a plain or company sleeve not specific to the release, which needs no further grading because it adds little value.

Two mistakes are common with inherited 78s. The first is assuming they are valuable because they are old; the second is throwing them out for the same reason in reverse.

Do this instead.

• Photograph every label you do not recognise before anything leaves the house.
• Look up completed auction results rather than asking prices. Popsike keeps an archive of over 30 million auction results covering more than two decades, including a blues category, and it is built specifically as a price guide.
• Accept that a stack of Victor and Columbia popular 78s is a stack of common records, and that this is normal.
• Keep the brittle ones flat and separated. A cracked disc has no market.

Our old records value page covers inherited collections across formats, and the vinyl grading scale page has each grade definition. Photograph the label and the app identifies the record, which matters most on the ones where you cannot read the label at all.