So you’re running a database of records with a storefront attached. It’s a bit niche, and the site looks like something made with Netscape Composer circa 1997, but it’s got a lot of goodwill. Your humble little site is still the best way to find and buy or sell rare and out of print records. It connects buyers and sellers pretty well, and provides a lifeline to record stores, the most beleaguered but indispensable members of the modern vinyl ecosystem.
Such a site might make a good business — maybe a bit precarious but a pretty good one if you don’t have investors breathing down your neck for a 10x return on their capital. If you do want that kind of thing, you’re probably in the wrong business.
The people that run Discogs are probably in the wrong business. That’s the most generous conclusion you can come to after a year in which they’ve managed to piss off sellers, alienate buyers and stir up so much confusion in the marketplace that nobody really knows what a record is worth anymore — ostensibly the reason the site exists.
What’s happened at Discogs isn’t a story that’s just “simmered” throughout 2023. It exploded in fireball in the Spring, and the rest of the year been a matter of post-trauma triage in which all survivors run a thorough diagnostic that says, yup, things are really as fucked up as they thought they were when sheets of fire incinerated everything in sight.
Essentially, the company jacked their fees — by 1% per sale, from 8% to 9%, but also began charging the same fee on shipping. Payments are also directed through PayPal, which takes their own percentage. This is on top of steadily increasing shipping rates in Germany, the United States and elsewhere. Everyone is paying more, except Discogs, which is getting more money for the same service.
The sticker shock was predictable, including by Discogs. “One of the easiest things you can do to maintain your business’s margins,” they wrote, “is to increase the pricing of the items in your inventory.” According to Natalie Weiner who wrote a fairly balanced and in-depth piece on the controversy for The Verge, Discogs also suggested sellers could just offer free shipping and hide the cost in the record price itself.
It sometimes seems like Discogs is run with the surliness of a stereotypical 1990s record store clerk, punched up by typical tech bro arrogance & the belief that 4chan was the apex of internet culture.
The fee increase lead to a shockingly abrupt price inflation on the site but only on the site, which was often used as a reference for private sales. Buyers saw an immediate price hike. The consensus of what a record is worth was always fragile, but now it’s completely broken down. The High, Low and Mean prices for past sales of a record doesn’t mean much when sometimes shipping is included and sometimes it’s not.
Discogs responded to the backlash by claiming that the root of the problem was fee avoidance, and that other selling platforms also charged a fee on shipping. This is actually true — but it turns out that this discount had been a major selling point for Discogs, which made navigating the more prosaic and frankly broken parts of the site more tolerable.
To be clear: Discogs’ problems didn’t materialize out of thin air last May. It’s an awkward and some would even say hostile platform. There’s a suspicion that comments on the site’s forums are monitored by staff and, it’s been alleged, are subject to retaliation. The Verge granted one particularly active seller anonymity because they feared “retribution by the company,” despite pulling in six figures of annual net revenue and being on the site since 2008. This person should be a VIP resident, a member in good standing in some kind of golden circle of Discogs advisors. Instead they’re afraid “deadwax420” will ding their sale pages in revenge for some fairly mild criticism.
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The same article noted that the increased fees certainly weren’t going toward support. Seller and buyer support from Discogs isn’t exactly hit or miss: it’s often non-existent, at least when you need it. Weeks or months can go by without a response to seemingly urgent issues, such as the spike in scammers on the site and hacked storefronts being brought out of dormancy to rip-off unsuspecting buyers or an Android app that logs users out every time they open it.
It sometimes seems like Discogs is run with the surliness of a stereotypical 1990s record store clerk, punched up by some typical tech bro arrogance and the belief that 4chan was the apex of internet culture. (Admittedly, most tech bros are arrogant because their software actually works, though.)
A number of sellers have since migrated to eBay, which has similar fees but a substantially larger user base, and often has photos of what you’re actually buying rather than a stock image that makes people complain they’ve been subject to bait-and-switch. And while eBay may not help you in a selling dispute, they also probably won’t ignore your support ticket for weeks at a time.
Without the fee discount and a thinning niche audience, the last advantage Discogs has as a marketplace — and which we use almost daily, to be honest — is its database. It’s hard to use, the photos are heavily compressed and sized for monitors smaller than a Nokia phone, but it’s still a huge treasure trove of information contributed by the site’s users over the last 23 years.
That database is available under a Creative Commons license (you can see the latest data dumps for 2023 here). There have been rumors of upstarts using the database either as a standalone site apart from Discogs’ ownership and the platform that currently publishes it — or in tandem with a new selling platform for records.
5 Mag Issue 211
Out January 2024
RESOLUTION: This was originally published in 5 Mag Issue #211 featuring Anané, Toribio, Black Eyes, Danny J Lewis, Beppe Loda and more. Help keep the vibe alive by becoming a member for $2/month and get every issue in your inbox right away!
