Just curious. I remember when i was growing up buying old 7" singles from charity shops and the market to play on the shitty hand-me-down stack stereo i had in my bedroom.
Come 2001 when I started buying CD albums, I mainly relied on Virgin and HMV. I mostly got new stuff but did buy some older rock albums. It was only when I got the internet and a working PC disc drive that I started hoovering up used CDs cheap online. This included countless indie albums that weren’t readily available on the high street new.
So, basically, this thread is inspired by me wanting to listen to Beautiful Freak by Eels at work on Sunday and finding that almost all his albums are out of print on the HMV system. But obviously, you can get it on Amazon or second hand for pennies.
In the 80s/90s though, was there a chain of used record shops that pretty much guaranteed you a copy of a popular-ish but no longer chart/stock worthy album?
Yeah, the Record and CD Exchange (think it’s name changed as the formats did) was an established chain. Always used to go to the Plymouth one on music-buying trips back in the day.
In Cardiff I only remember there being independent places, plus the big record fayre that’d happen in St David’s Hall (which would also be great for picking up bootlegs).
Used to be quite a few branches in London but only Greenwich and Notting Hill left now. Went for the first time a couple of days ago after moving down to Somerset six years ago. Sadly the Notting Hill one was very disappointing now with over half the bargain basement stuffed full of classical cds. With cd promos not really a thing anymore the racks were a lot emptier than they used to be although I understand it flooded a few years back.
Vinyl exchange was the goat in manchester when i lived there, for CDs at least. Used to be able to get pretty much anything I could think of for fuck all
I don’t really have an answer to this but I was always amazed when I first went to the US in the mid-2000s how every indie record shop had a massive preowned section, with nearly-new copies of even current releases for less than new prices. I guess culture is a bit different here and people were more likely to hang onto stuff (?) but it always felt like a shame none of the ones over here really did this.
Another vote for the record and tape exhange shops in London and Manchester back in the mid 90s, absolute gold mines for bargain finds.
Nice to see the second hand shops in the Bournemouth area from my youth still going strong. Snu Peas still good for a dig, and more recently found Rose Red records just down the road which was better for newer stuff. Big Brother over in Parkstone also excellent, as is Boiler Room in Poole. Wish my local area now was as well covered for 2nd hand shops.
Vinyl Exchange in Manchester seemed to have pretty much everything on vinyl in the early 90s when I was there. I still occasionally find one of their stickers on the inner sleeve of an LP.
Used to pick up second hand stuff from lots of places though - stalls in the Corn Exchange and Afkecks Palace, market stalls, small second shops I can’t recall the name of. There were even regular record fairs at the student union or just random halls.