A record is worth what one person paid for it on one afternoon. These are the ten places where that afternoon actually happens for blues and jazz — the specialist salerooms that catalogue shellac by matrix number, the aggregators that put forty regional auction houses behind one bidding paddle, and the memorabilia rooms where a single signed copy can outbid a whole collection. Each entry says what it is good for and what to watch. None of them pays us anything, and none of them is a valuation service.
Ordered by how often a serious blues or jazz record turns up there, not by prestige. eBay first because that is where the supply is; the catalogue houses after it because that is where the documented copies are.
Open marketplace · worldwide
The deepest supply of blues and jazz records anywhere, and the least vetting. Paramount 78s, Chess first pressings, acetates, test pressings and dead-stock European jazz all surface here, usually described by someone who does not know what they have. Titles are unreliable; matrix numbers and dead-wax inscriptions are the only identifiers worth trusting, so ask for them before you bid.
Watch: grading is optimistic and self-assigned. A "VG+" sleeve often is not.
Specialist auction house · United States
A saleroom devoted entirely to pre-microgroove sound: 78s, cylinders, transcription discs, Edison Diamond Discs and test pressings. Catalogue sales run as numbered auctions with real descriptions, which is a different order of thing from a marketplace listing. They state plainly that they do not deal in LPs, 45s, tapes or CDs — which is exactly why the shellac is good.
Watch: quarterly cadence, so the record you want appears when it appears.
Vinyl specialist auction house · United Kingdom
A general record saleroom that runs a dedicated jazz and blues department, and one of the few houses that will come to a house and take a whole collection away. Volumes are large — the house describes shifting around half a million records a year — so lots are often collections rather than single rarities, which is where a disciplined buyer can do well.
Watch: collection lots hide condition problems in the middle of the box.
Vintage 78 dealer and auctioneer · United Kingdom
A dealer's stock and a quarterly 78rpm auction under one roof, specialising in the labels that define blues collecting: Paramount, Gennett, OKeh, Vocalion, Champion, QRS, Berliner, Edison, Pathé, Tri-Ergon. If you have been waiting for a specific pre-war side to appear with an honest grade attached, this is the sort of place it appears.
Watch: catalogue first, decide before the hammer, not during it.
Curated online auctions · Netherlands
Themed weekly sales with in-house specialists reviewing the lots, including a standing jazz and blues vinyl auction alongside soul, funk and general rock sales. More structured than a marketplace, more frequent than a catalogue house, and unusually strong for European pressings that American bidders rarely see.
Watch: buyer's premium and per-lot shipping add up fast across borders.
Auction aggregator · United States
One bidding account across thousands of regional auction houses, with a standing vinyl and 78 category. Most of what it lists is not specialist — boxes of records from house clearances — but that is precisely how uncatalogued blues turns up cheap, in a sale in a town nobody was watching.
Watch: the aggregator is not the auctioneer; terms, premiums and shipping are the house's.
Auction aggregator · United States
The same idea as LiveAuctioneers with a different roster of houses, including the large collectibles auctioneers. Useful as a second net: sales that appear in one aggregator are often absent from the other, and a saved search on both costs nothing but an account.
Watch: duplicated listings across aggregators can make a lot look busier than it is.
Collectibles auction house · Dallas, United States
The largest collectibles auctioneer in the world by its own account, and the place where records arrive with provenance attached — an artist's own copy, an estate lot, a documented test pressing. Blues and jazz appear inside themed music and memorabilia sales rather than in a dedicated record department, so the catalogue needs reading rather than filtering.
Watch: provenance is what you are paying for. Condition second.
Autograph and memorabilia auction · New Hampshire, United States
An autograph house with a jazz, blues and standards category, which means signed photographs, contracts, handwritten lyrics and the odd signed LP. Not where you go for a clean copy of a scarce 78 — where you go when the object carries a hand.
Watch: authentication matters more than the record inside the sleeve.
Entertainment memorabilia auction · Los Angeles and Nashville
Estate and celebrity sales, staged live and online, with rare and signed vinyl, test pressings and stage-used material among the guitars. Blues content is thinner here than jazz and rock, but when a musician's own collection is sold — the working copies, the promos, the things kept at home — this is where it goes.
Watch: premiums on star-associated lots are for the association, not the pressing.
Popsike is not a saleroom and sells nothing. It is an archive of completed auction results — tens of millions of them, largely from eBay, running back to 2004 — searchable by artist and title, with a blues category. A hammer price is evidence; an asking price is an opinion. Check the evidence before you set a limit, and check it again when the same record appears twice in a year.
Every house on this list adds a buyer's premium, and the rate differs by house, by sale and sometimes by how you bid — in the room, on the phone, or through an aggregator that charges its own fee on top. A lot that closes at £800 can cost £1,000 before shipping. Work the total backwards from your limit, not forwards from the hammer.
There is no universal standard behind "VG+" and no enforcement behind "rare". Two copies of the same Paramount side graded the same way can differ by a factor of five in price, because what actually decides it is surface noise on the loud passages, whether the label is original, and whether the matrix matches the first pressing. Ask for the dead-wax string. A seller who cannot supply it is telling you something.
The Lost Blues Archive has no commercial relationship with any site listed here and receives nothing from them. Descriptions reflect how each saleroom presents itself and how it behaves in the record trade; fees, categories and sale calendars change without notice, so confirm terms with the house before bidding. Prices quoted anywhere on this site are auction records, never valuations of your copy.
