If you bought The Beatles - Rubber Soul, on date of release in December 1965, how much would it have cost you? (presumably on vinyl).
4 shillings on minidisc
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4 hours shift down t’pit and a week of liver and onions
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I wouldn’t have bought it on account of not being born then
This letter to the Guardian suggests that an LP was £1 12s 6d around that time.
According to an online converter:
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That would really depend on which variant/colourway I decided to get. I’d also have been tempted to wait a few weeks after release, in case they put out a version with bonus tracks, or a special disc actually made out of rubber or something.
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Spent about twenty minutes trying to find a simple answer to this.
- There’s no definitive source online
- It was before pricing labels/stickers were added to releases so looking at first pressings etc is no good
- Looked at some listings for Melody Maker/Record Mirror/NME on eBay, but few if any record shops themselves actually advertised at the time. Instead it was all record labels and bands (!) that advertised, so no go there.
- A few AI models (boo) suggest an average album cost of 32 shillings and sixpence at the time but list no source so totally disregarding that
I reckon the best source is going to be a local newspaper for a biggish town, where the local shops would have listed availability and price. That’s the sort of source that’s not readily available online though.
In short: 
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That’s a link to the ‘answer’ not just a generic link to ChatGPT btw
(likely scraped that answer from the guardian link senordingdong posted)
No source but I recall when All Things Must Pass was reissued recently the standard version (but effectively a box set as it is 4 records in a box) was something silly like £125 but it turned out to be an almost identical cost, adjusted for inflation obviously, to the original release. Original release was a no. 1 album as well so plenty of people willing to hand over a lot of cash.
So a long winded way of saying I reckon probably pretty much equivalent to a new release now.
The owner of the record shop I worked in, before my time, in the 60’s sold The Beatles albums as they originally released. When Be Here Now was released, in the 90’s I opened the shop, (different location the original shop he would have sold The Beatles from in the 60’s), at 8am, because demand for the album was so high. Sold a lot of copies of Be Here Now day 1, when the owner rolled in about midday he asked me how many people were queuing outside, to which there were about 4 people. He replied that The Beatles new studio albums would have like a 30 strong queue before the shop opened.
So, to factor in decimalisation, which was 1971, how much would say, Carole King - Tapestry have cost at release on vinyl?
“Adjusting for inflation, the equivalent cost today would be much higher.”
Lol didn’t even read it
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