Online Record Stores
As a vintage record collector, i am not the kind of person you would expect to buy music online. Nonetheless, I have found that online record stores are actually the best way for me to find a lot of the rare pieces I look for. do not get me wrong buying used vinyl still involves a lot of digging through countless boxes of old LPs. there is a downtown record store that I go to several times a month with thousands of uncatalogued records that you just have to dig through to find. It is always an adventure, and I do not know if I will come home with a precious find or nothing at all.
Even so, lately I seem to be having better luck with online music stores. I have been buying music equipment that I use online for a long time. My turntables, my guitar, my PA they were all ordered off the Internet. I only just started browsing online record stores out of curiosity a few months ago. There was an old jazz LP that I had been looking for for almost a year, and I wanted to see if I could find a copy on eBay. Something that i have spent countless hours on took me less than 15 minutes once I started looking online. Impressive to say the least!
One of the great things about online record stores is that you can look through many stores at the same time. There are private collectors, big outlets, warehouses belonging to major labels, and all kinds of other resources available. You can comparison shop for records that are so rare that you can usually only found one of them in the store. All in all, it is a great step up from having to rely on your small local record dealer alone.
I also like online record stores because I do not have a car. Portland has pretty good public transportation, but it is still quite a rigmarole to have to run all over town looking for records. If I go to an online record store, I can find whatever I want and have it delivered to my door. Instead of spending hours on the bus going back and forth, all I have to do is turn on my computer and boot up the Internet. Some of it does take a little bit of extra time order forms tend to be more involved online than buying something in person but that seems to be a small inconvenience when set besides the convenience of being able to buy things from your house.
