Rare LP Records: What Rare Vinyl Albums Are Worth

A rare LP record is one that was withdrawn, recalled, or pressed in a run small enough that collectors can count it. Here is what the best-documented examples have made.

• Bob Dylan, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), the version with four songs that were later deleted — up to US$35,000 in stereo and US$16,500 in mono in excellent condition. Ordinary copies of the released version sell for the price of a takeaway.
• The Beatles, The Beatles (White Album), copy 0000001 — US$790,000 in 2015. Copy 0000005, the first one a member of the public could buy, made £19,201 on eBay in 2008.
• The Beatles, Yesterday and Today, sealed first-state stereo butcher cover — about US$125,000 in 2016. A sealed mono "Livingston Butcher" sold for close to US$39,000 at Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas in April 2006, and the first documented sale of a mono butcher cover, back in 1974, was US$457.
• Judge, Chung King Can Suck It! (1989) — a copy sold for US$6,048 on Discogs.com in May 2015.
• NOFX, The Decline, clear vinyl 1st press (one of 155) — sold for US$967 at a Popsike-archived auction in August 2010.

The butcher cover shows how much the version matters within one title. A first state was never pasted over. A second state has the replacement "trunk" picture glued on top, identifiable because Ringo Starr's black V-neck shirt from the original shows through. A third state is one where somebody peeled the paste-over off, and those are the most common and the least valuable of the three.

The same title can be common and rare at once. Freewheelin' has sold millions of copies; the withdrawn four-song version is a handful of discs. Yesterday and Today was a normal Capitol release; the unpasted first state is the rare object. The White Album exists in tens of millions of copies, and one of them is worth three quarters of a million dollars because of a number stamped on the sleeve.

This is why valuation starts with identification. Before you look up a price, you need to know the country of manufacture, the label design in use that year, the catalogue number, whether it is mono or stereo, and the full string in the runout groove on both sides.

Goldmine's own price guides list only LPs manufactured in the United States, or made abroad specifically for US release. Anything on Parlophone before about 2000, anything marked BIEM, GEMA or MAPL, and anything that says "Made in Canada" or "Made in the UK" is an import and is not in those guides at all. A Japanese pressing with its obi strip intact can be worth more than the American edition; other imports attract almost no American interest. So the first question is not "what is this album worth" but "which edition is this".

Two of the best-known rarities in this article came out of ordinary places.

The Velvet Underground & Nico acetate — a studio reference disc, not a commercial LP — was bought for 75 cents at a flea market in Chelsea, New York, in September 2002. On 8 December 2006 an eBay bid of US$155,401 was placed and not honoured; the disc was relisted and sold on 16 December 2006 for US$25,200.

The sealed mono butcher covers known as "Livingston Butchers" came out of Alan Livingston's personal collection: twenty-four sealed albums released in 1987, which is why their provenance is beyond argument and their prices are at the top of the range.

The practical lesson is that rarity is found by looking, not by waiting. Boxes at estate sales, house clearances and church jumble sales are where undocumented copies still surface, and the people who find them are the ones who can read a label at a glance.

Every published figure above assumes a high grade, usually Near Mint or sealed. Goldmine estimates that no more than 2 to 4 per cent of all records surviving from the 1950s and 1960s are genuinely Near Mint, and its standard is not on a sliding scale — a 1957 record has to meet the same test as a 1997 one.

Below that, the multipliers are published. Very Good Plus is generally worth about half of Near Mint. Very Good is no more than 25 per cent. Good and Good Plus are 10 to 15 per cent. Poor and Fair are 0 to 5 per cent, if they sell at all. Only genuinely rare records sell for more than small change in Poor condition.

Sealed copies can beat the guide price, and Goldmine warns why paying a premium for them is risky: the shrink wrap may have been replaced, the record inside may not be Near Mint, it may not be the original pressing, and on rare occasions it is the wrong record entirely.

Work through it in this order.

• Write down the catalogue number from the label and the spine.
• Note mono or stereo, and the exact label design and address line.
• Transcribe the runout string on both sides, keeping hyphens, spacing and case, and note whether each part is etched by hand or machine-stamped.
• Grade the disc and the sleeve separately under a strong light held at an angle.
• Look up completed sales for that exact pressing, not for the title.

Our first pressing guide covers the five signs dealers rely on, and the runout and matrix guide shows how to read the dead wax. If you would rather not start from scratch, photograph the label and the sleeve and the app identifies the record for you.