Vinyl Records Get Their Own Stock Market, Thanks to Discogs and RBMA

Discogs and Red Bull Music Academy (RBMA) have teamed up for Vinyl Marketwatch, a new site that tracks vinyl record prices. Described on the new project's website as "an collaborative ongoing experiment" between the two companies, the Vinyl Marketwatch is like a tongue-in-cheek stock exchange for vinyl aficionados.

The website is built a bit like any other business news portal with a breaking news feed, market trends graphs and scrolling stock information for various genres. Visually, it is an overwhelming onslaught of vinyl record-relation information.

The project itself uses the Discogs marketplace to track daily price fluctuations within different genres. Prices are calculated by keeping tabs on the top 250 most wanted records within those selected genres then performing daily analyses on the median price of sold items for each of those releases.

For example, at the time of this writing, the site's breaking news feed is declaring today a great day for freestyle fans, as the price of freestyle records has gone down five cents to a median price of $20.29. Meanwhile, the feed has determined that today is a dismal day for boogie fans with boogie records currently trading at $73.11.

Basically, you can finally find out how much the average price of tech house records has fluctuated in the last month, how little the average price of drum'n'bass records has fluctuated in the last month, exactly how economically unpopular prog rock is, and whether or not you own any of the most sought after doom metal or techno LPs on the database.

The project is meant to be more of a parody of speculative vinyl collector culture than an actual resource, and as Harder Faster Blogger reports, Sound Pellegrino's Teki Latex is in on the joke too as a host on Vinyl Marketwatch's news.

As Resident Advisor points out, RBMA also includes a disclaimer on the new site, stating "As passionate music buyers ourselves, this site most definitely does not endorse speculative vinyl collector culture. This site should be used for entertainment and general data purposes only."

Get to know the site's newscaster in his most recent RBMA lecture, below.

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Vinyl