Places to buy Vinyl Records online

Posted by Daniel Stout on Mon 14 Jan 2008 at 8:19 PM

With the explosion of new vinyl coming out, you may run into the question of where to buy the stuff. Chain stores no longer vinyl – whether you’re talking Fye up to a store like Target or Walmart, you’re just not going to find vinyl. If you’re looking for a bricks & mortar store, your best bet is a local independent music shop. These stores can cater to your vinyl needs, and often can do special orders for things they don’t carry.

If you’re looking for online buying, there are now a variety of options. I’ll point out the ones I’ve worked with that either have the best selection or the best prices or both.

Not surprisingly, Amazon.com has become a contender in the vinyl market. They opened up a vinyl store on their website last fall. The Amazon.com Vinyl Store has a lot of software with an especially good selection of alternative rock and a variety of other genres. The bands that have most strongly adopted vinyl seem to be in the alternative slant of things, so it only seems natural that alternative rock would have a strong representation at Amazon’s store. Amazon has slight discounts over the retail prices of the vinyl – although not as deep as my local record store. They also offer their customary free shipping for orders over $25. A couple of records will easily put you into that category.

Somewhat strangely, the big-box electronics store Circuit City has a large selection of vinyl records on their website. Currently featuring 10,624 different albums, the Circuit City vinyl store has a variety of ways to slice and dice the collection and find what you want. You can search obviously by artist or album title, but you can drill down with genre searches or if you’re looking for a specific format such as the 12” single, you can search just those as well. Other ways to search are by decade or by price. Lots of ways on the Circuit City website to find what you’re looking for. The store isn’t as attractive as Amazon’s, but the sheer volume of the available vinyl is impressive.

Those are two big stores, and to balance those out I’ll point out a couple of niche stores. The first is Music Direct, which is based in Chicago and features an excellent print catalog. Their website too is really great. They focus more on the audiophile end of the spectrum and include not only vinyl, but SACD and DVD-A releases as well. They also have a handsome selection of audio electronics including turntables. In my experience, they ship quickly, and they do a good job of packing the vinyl for shipment. If I had to judge, I would probably say that their general demographic is a little bit older, hence you’ll see lots of classic rock and jazz vinyl re-issues. And for some reason those categories seem to be more expensive. While a re-issue of My Bloody Valentine, for example, might run you $15, a re-issue of The Doors will run you $30.

If you’re looking for dance & DJ vinyl, a great place to go for that is Turntable Lab, based out of NYC. Their vinyl selection is freakishly good. You’ll see things in there that you won’t see anywhere else. Rare 12” remixes abound and they also have a selection of regular vinyl as well. The website is pretty deep – there’s a ton of stuff to find on their including streetwear, books, DJ equipment and so on. They’re running a free shipping deal if you order $99 worth of stuff.

Those are a few of my favorite places to find vinyl online. In all cases, I prefer to buy from a local shop, but the advantage of the websites is their encyclopedic collections of vinyl. There is bound to be something there of interest, and I hope you have good luck with these businesses.

Tags: amazon.com · circuit city · music direct · turntable lab · vinyl

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