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MOSSEL BAY NEWS AND VIDEO - Long-playing (LP) records, previously collectors’ items of the older generation, are now popular among young people.
This is according to a Mossel Bay secondhand store owner, Benjamin Nel. He has a large shop, more like a warehouse, in the town centre.
See a gallery of photos here: Youth enjoying the vinyl vibe
Nel says some of the youth have a vintage LP player from a grandfather and they enjoy playing records.
Music they are looking for is mainly classic rock and pop, such as the albums of The Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Queen, Bryan Adams and more.
Records are put to all sorts of other uses. One of Nel’s customers uses them to make handbags, combining them with leather. Records are used for home and wedding decor as well.
“I have LPs priced from R10 right through to R600.” He regularly checks the value of various albums on the internet. “Some fetch $50 000,” Nel says.
Rare
Records, such as Pink Floyd’s The Wall are rare and fetch high prices, he notes as an example.
Nel has a large record section in his store, with a stool on hand so people can sit down, because they spend hours poring over the LPs.
You name it, you can find it: The Beatles, Abba, Gé Korsten, Springbok Radio Hit Parade. The list goes on. “CDs will be popular in a few years,” Nel predicts.
Nel’s store manager, Dino Rossouw, says: “People need to get new styluses for record players. They are available online.”
See a video of Rossouw here:
He sells record players in the region of R400 to R700. “We test the LP players and don’t sell them if they don’t work.”
Avid LP collector Grant Simpson, who trawls through secondhand shops and Facebook Marketplace, says: “I collect to grow my collection and also to sell records. I just missed the vinyl heyday and grew up with tapes and CDs.
“The current generation is a touch-and-feel one. People like having the music in their hands, so vinyls are making a comeback.
“My girlfriend and I bought a crate of vinyls a few years ago and the bug bit. There is a treasure hunt element to it.”
Learning
He says he enjoys learning about records and their value, which is determined by the cover condition, vinyl condition, what year the record was pressed, by which press and where it was pressed.”
He has 4 000 to 5 000 records, “and that fluctuates.”
Simpson says: “The sad part is, mostly they get thrown away and lost to the world. My favourites are Black Sabbath, Metallica and Iron Maiden LPs.”
He also scooped a treasured record by The Clash a few years back.
“I have three LP players.”
Simpson says he finds his records on Bob Shop, which was formerly bidorbuy.co.za, at secondhand stores and on Facebook Marketplace.
Besides his prized metal collection, he has some Pink Floyds, Erasure, Boston, Dire Straits, UB40 and Bonnie Tyler records. He says he has only been scammed once, on Facebook.
“If it sounds too good to be true, it’s a scam,” he says.
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