That Escalated Quickly (aka Common Records Turned Rare)

I was so stoked when I saw it, because I didn’t pick it up until a day or two after his passing. I suppose that’s one of the good things about living in a town where they only listen to country and classic rock. And thanks for your kind offer, but it means means too much to me.

oh, I didn't think you were going to part with it, but just putting it out there if anyone looks at theirs and think, ugh why do I have this, I will just take it from you so you don't need to worry about it anymore 🧐
 
Oh God, awesome idea. Fiona Apple's The Idler Wheel... is a good example I can think of — I bought it in store for around US$20 when it came out, and I think it took a year before the prices started becoming absurd.

Sade's Love Deluxe is one that surprised me. I sat on it for the longest time because I thought it would be available forever, since that has happened for MOV non-colored pressings for the most part, but the prices are high enough now that I'm eagerly waiting for a repress.

There's an Audio Fidelity reissue of Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, cut by Kevin Gray on pink marbled vinyl, that stuck around for a while, even if it was at a premium price fitting most audiophile pressings. And then I think it was around the time the Kate Bush remasters were announced that the prices for this started climbing. There was a local listing for this at a decent price that I was considering, and that disappeared immediately as this became rarer.

Also, strangely enough, the Back to Black reissue of Scott Walker's Scott 4 had suddenly become OOP this year, likely due to Walker's death. But while this is now rare, the rest of the Scott albums are still available, so maybe it means Scott 4 is the undeniable favourite amongst fans? I don't know.


Are you talking about this RSD 10”?

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Because it’s bananas that this only has 4 songs and sells for over $100.
 
I have two copies of the most valuable record (per Discogs) that I have in my collection... and I got them both by accident. I picked up first copy back in 2006/2007 for $20-ish as a throw-in purchase for my wife (a way to justify me buying 4-5 records per trip to the record store is always to buy something “for her”). Then, when my dad recently moved, he gave me a stack of records that he had acquired over the years... including another copy of:

James Blunt Back to Bedlam. I cannot believe this goes for $250-$450 now.

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Oh God, awesome idea. Fiona Apple's The Idler Wheel... is a good example I can think of — I bought it in store for around US$20 when it came out, and I think it took a year before the prices started becoming absurd.

Sade's Love Deluxe is one that surprised me. I sat on it for the longest time because I thought it would be available forever, since that has happened for MOV non-colored pressings for the most part, but the prices are high enough now that I'm eagerly waiting for a repress.

There's an Audio Fidelity reissue of Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, cut by Kevin Gray on pink marbled vinyl, that stuck around for a while, even if it was at a premium price fitting most audiophile pressings. And then I think it was around the time the Kate Bush remasters were announced that the prices for this started climbing. There was a local listing for this at a decent price that I was considering, and that disappeared immediately as this became rarer.

Also, strangely enough, the Back to Black reissue of Scott Walker's Scott 4 had suddenly become OOP this year, likely due to Walker's death. But while this is now rare, the rest of the Scott albums are still available, so maybe it means Scott 4 is the undeniable favourite amongst fans? I don't know.
Glad to have bought 3 out of those 4 for cheap, I was also surprised at the rise of that Kate Bush and that Sade. Still need to get that Scott Walker box.
 
No, it's this one it's a repress of the 2010 version, but it still goes for more for some reason, but that's crazy...how limited was this 10"? Does it have anything special about it?
No! It was an 2011 RSD release and has 4 songs from Hounds of Love: The Big Sky, Cloudbusting, Watching You Without Me and Jig of Life.
 
A couple Death Grips releases are like this. When the Fashion Week RSD release first came about, the price stayed relatively low for a LONG time. For at least a year or so it never really went above 35 bucks. Checked Discogs a few months ago, the shit's now consistently going for 100-plus. Like @gaporter said too, The Powers That B was similar. Was a VERY common record for a while, now goes for some crazy prices. I remember copies of it were sitting in my local record store for a long while after it came out, never thought it'd suddenly become so coveted!

Oddly enough, the self-titled album from WZRD (Kid Cudi's TERRIBLE rock side-project) shot up tremendously. I got it for 13 bucks a couple years after it first came out. One day I realized "Oh wait, I don't like this shit at all" and went to Discogs thinking I could probablyyy make my 13 bucks back if I'm lucky. Ended up making nearly ten times that amount (don't judge me - that was still lower than the lowest sold price in the Discogs stats at the time ;) )

Being outside of the US, the frustrating thing about the Death Grips RSD releases is that they never seem to make it overseas. Fashion Week was available for a while at a normal price so I sat on it, and of course now I regret it.
 
I bought a copy of The Things We Think We're Missing by Balance and Composure for like $15 online without realizing it was an exclusive variant limited to like 300 copies and I resold it for double the price, thinking I'd be able to get another one. But in the last two or three months I saw variants going near $40-60 on Discogs. I pulled the trigger on it today when I saw someone list it for $21.
 
I will take that off your hands, I had it in my hands on Saturday at B&N and I thought this might be interesting to get and put it down and then Sunday/Monday came around
I ordered it online for in store pickup. Woke up the next day to the news and subsequently a voicemail from B&N asking if I planned to pick it up soon because their phone had been ringing off the hook asking to buy it
 
The two most recent examples I can think of:
- The Beatles mono reissues are definitely climbing in value. I guess people didn't expect them to go out-of-print after a few years.
- That recent MBV Loveless reissue that was only sold on their website.
 
The two most recent examples I can think of:
- The Beatles mono reissues are definitely climbing in value. I guess people didn't expect them to go out-of-print after a few years.
- That recent MBV Loveless reissue that was only sold on their website.

I need to grab some of those Beatles reissues - so far, it seems like Sgt. Pepper's is the biggest climber, but I'm really only interested in a handful that doesn't include that, so I best get on those.

Anyway, I spend too much time on Discogs, like many of you, so here are some I've come across which were strange to see shift in value:

Clean Bandit - New Eyes
Metallica & Lou Reed - Lulu (US pressing cut by Bernie Grundman, EU/UK pressing w/ GZ Media stamper still in-stock)
Alice in Chains - The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here (especially stunning because I saw copies of these in local stores sit for years)
21 Savage & Metro Boomin - Savage Mode
The Dillinger Escape Plan - One Of Us Is The Killer (probably due to the fact that the band is currently inactive and was the first to be released under their own imprint, unlike Relapse and Season Of Mist who handled prior albums with reissues)
Everything Everything - Get To Heaven
Mariya Takeuchi - Variety

The last one needs a longer liner, because it's also the perfect example of price-gouging that can be repulsive. Mariya Takeuchi is the singer of 'Plastic Love', which has since become a viral song online - mainly because it's an amazing funk-pop tune, but it's also the torchbearer for city pop's renewed popularity. 'Plastic Love' is on Variety, and the album sold quite a lot of copies back in 1980s Japan.

So as you can imagine, plenty of vinyl was manufactured to meet that demand then, and it was a common album you could find in Tokyo crates. I can attest to this because I have a local record shop whose owner makes monthly trips to Japan and brings back heavy shipments of Japanese pressings. There was almost always a copy of Variety with every shipment, and every copy never hit the US$20 mark.

This continued well into city pop's popularity online, at least amongst vaporwave/future funk communities. I never got one because the rest of the album simply doesn't hold up next to it. Nothing else sounds like 'Plastic Love', and not just in quality. There are a lot of soul ballads, 60s pop and a little bit of rock'n'roll, but most of them are slower in tempo and without the studio-pristine funk that characterizes what people love about city pop in the first place. It could be one of the reasons why collectors were paying much more for the 'Plastic Love' single than Variety, going up to over US$200, years before 'Plastic Love' got this kind of attention.

I can't pinpoint exactly when prices started to shoot, but it seemed like when sites like Vice wrote about it that interest grew — along with increasing exposure of the original YouTube upload — and subsequently even local shops were marking it up above US$70, which was insane. It encouraged a lot of grimy behaviour around me when it came to that record which, again, had been very cheap and common barely a year before. I get the economics of scarcity, but this one completely rubbed me off the wrong way.

TL;DR - if you want a copy of Variety, there are probably still cheap copies lying around in Japan, but it's really not that great of an album anyway. There are far better city pop albums worth your time.
 
I have two copies of the most valuable record (per Discogs) that I have in my collection... and I got them both by accident. I picked up first copy back in 2006/2007 for $20-ish as a throw-in purchase for my wife (a way to justify me buying 4-5 records per trip to the record store is always to buy something “for her”). Then, when my dad recently moved, he gave me a stack of records that he had acquired over the years... including another copy of:

James Blunt Back to Bedlam. I cannot believe this goes for $250-$450 now.

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I saw a copy of this at a record fair for $150. It was the last day so I think that was too high too for anyone.
 
My copy of Loveless went up in price and was over 50 dollars. It's not even an original but one done by Plain Recordings.
Same, I picked up a copy of the repress from their website for £21. Listened to it once then stuck it on the shelf. A few months later a guy messaged me and offered £175 for it. Safe to say I took that offer and bought a load more records I would actually listen to with the money!
 
TBH, not entirely sure? Went to get the link for the Iron Age video and saw in the comments something to the effect of 'Who else came here cause of Earl Sweatshirt' or one of those type posts and figured he musta mentioned him on social media.

Two years ago I spent an afternoon in NYC visiting local record shops. Ka records were impossible to find... I ordered Honor Killed the Samurai online and had the record shipped to my hotel but that's it :(
 
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Two years ago I spent an afternoon in NYC visite local record shops. Ka records were impossible to find... I ordered Honor Killed the Samurai online and had the record shipped to my hotel but that's it :(

I've been telling him since Grief Pedigree first came out that he needs distribution or to link with a label to do distribution but dude wants to do everything himself. I respect the hustle but I think he's leaving a grip of money on the table too.
 
I've been telling him since Grief Pedigree first came out that he needs distribution or to link with a label to do distribution but dude wants to do everything himself. I respect the hustle but I think he's leaving a grip of money on the table too.

Definitely. TBH I had the opportunity to order all his discography from his website but the shipping were crazy.
 
Definitely. TBH I had the opportunity to order all his discography from his website but the shipping were crazy.

Doesn't HHV carry any of his releases? I figured they'd at least do a bulk order and carry it but I've always just ordered it directly from him so I never bothered looking at other avenues for snagging his releases..
 
Doesn't HHV carry any of his releases? I figured they'd at least do a bulk order and carry it but I've always just ordered it directly from him so I never bothered looking at other avenues for snagging his releases..

They used to have one or another Ka's record from time to time. I should have pulled the trigger.
 
They used to have one or another Ka's record from time to time. I should have pulled the trigger.

I don't know how much of a fan / completist you are, but I'd definitely recommend the stuff he did with Natural Elements and Nightbreed as well.
 
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