UPDATE 2026
This commentary was written many years ago, about the time (2004) when we started selling Hot Stamper pressings in very limited numbers. The numbers were limited because shootouts were so hard to do back then. Some took days to complete. Many were a struggle.
It starts with the following paragraph:
We freely admit that we paid south of thirty bucks each at local stores for many of the records on our site. We pay what the stores charge, and most good rock records are priced from ten to thirty bucks these days.
ADDENDUM #1
About five ten years ago we added this text to the listing:
This is no longer true, but it was true when this commentary was written. Most rock records cost us double and triple what we used to pay, if they can be found at all.
ADDENDUM #2
As of 2022, we would like to point out that very few good records can be found in local Los Angeles stores these days. Young people have started collecting records again, so the supply of records in the stores is a small fraction of what it was even five years ago, and the prices have doubled and tripled for the better titles. Foreigner and Carly Simon we can still find locally, but Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin? Forget it.
These developments means that we have been forced into buying mostly from dealers on the web, paying the collector prices they charge and, like any business, passing the costs on to our customers. There is no other way to run a business that specializes in old records.
Vintage LPs are practically the only ones that have the potential to be Hot Stamper pressings, and we must pay whatever they cost in order to acquire them in large enough numbers so that our record shootouts can continue.
The rest of the commentary describes a business that no longer works the way it did.
Unfortunately for us, the price we paid for the records you see on the site is only a small part of the cost of the finished “product.” The reality of our business is that it costs almost as much to find a Carly Simon or Gino Vannelli Hot Stamper that sells for a hundred dollars as it does to find a Neil Young or Yes Hot Stamper that sells for five times that.
ADDENDUM #3
Not true, obviously. Neil Young records cost ten or twenty times more than Carly Simon records these days, which is only fitting as they are ten to twenty times better in every way.
