The €1 Record Problem: Why Brocantes Are More Fun Than eBay

There is a point where an online bargain stops being a bargain and starts becoming a shipping invoice. Brocantes have ruined me for sensible record buying.

I was looking at an eBay lot recently: €50 for the records and another €35 to get them delivered. Nothing especially outrageous by online standards. But all I could think was that €85 is an entire afternoon at a brocante and a record shop.

And, more importantly, the brocante is more fun.

The economics are only half of it

I like cheap records. Not because every record has to be cheap, and not because I am trying to build the world’s lowest-cost collection. I will happily pay proper money for something I really want in excellent condition.

But there is something uniquely satisfying about finding a record for €1, €2 or €5 when you had no idea it was going to be there. The price makes curiosity affordable. You can take a punt on something unfamiliar, buy an album because the sleeve looks interesting, or pick up a battered-looking copy simply because you want to know whether it still plays.

Online buying removes the surprise

Online marketplaces are brilliant when you know exactly what you want. Search the artist, compare copies, pick the pressing, pay the money, wait for the postman. Efficient. Sensible. Dangerous for the bank balance.

A brocante is the opposite. You are not searching a database. You are rummaging through someone else’s history. Half the sleeves are upside down, half the records need cleaning, and every now and then something appears that you would never have searched for in the first place.

That is how a collection starts developing personality instead of becoming a shopping list.

The €1 record has permission to be weird

If I spend €30 on a record, I probably already know why I want it. If I spend €1, the record gets to explain itself later.

Maybe it turns out to be brilliant. Maybe it has a strange pressing history. Maybe the sleeve contains something unexpected. Maybe it is terrible and never gets played again. At €1, all of those outcomes are acceptable.

The hunt is part of the collection

I am increasingly realising that the acquisition story matters almost as much as the object. A record found in a French field sale, carried home, cleaned, researched and discovered properly has a different place in the collection from one ordered in thirty seconds from a marketplace.

Neither is better in some grand moral sense. I am still going to buy records online. There are albums on the want list that I am unlikely to stumble across for €3 next to a box of rusty tools.

But give me €85 and the choice between one online order or an afternoon of crate rummaging followed by a record shop?

I already know which way I am driving.