Filled nearly floor to ceiling with stacks of vinyl records, the 10th floor of the California Market Center was swarmed with people. Long-time and rookie vinyl collectors alike gathered together over the weekend to buy and trade vinyl records at Los Angeles’ VinylCon!. 

Like the name suggests, VinylCon! is a convention event. Over the course of Aug. 23 and 24, people gathered to discuss, share and network with one another concerning their common interest: vinyl records. The event celebrates the collection of records, their preservation and the myriad of types of music they house. Vendors come to sell, trade and even buy records from customers — and customers come for those same reasons.  

“It was a great promotion. A lot of people came around from different countries, different places, and it was a great turnout,” said Jason Garcia, owner of a record store in San Bernardino, California, that does mostly pop-ups.

Vendors from all around spend the week prior to the convention preparing their inventory for interested customers.

“There’s people from literally all over the world, so a lot of different collections can be made,” said Sarah Rewold, a volunteer at VinylCon!. “A guy got a Grateful Dead show from Korea on vinyl last night that he was super pumped about. So I’ve just seen people really unearth a lot of treasures.”

Because some of the vendors aren’t from Los Angeles, transporting the records to VinylCon! requires extreme care and caution, especially given L.A.’s notorious summer weather. 

“We packed up the van on Wednesday and loaded them all in,” said Elliot Jonckers, a staff member of a record shop that sells its vinyls out of an antique gallery in Lewisville, Texas. “You gotta be careful driving this far with the records in the van, because they’ll melt.”

For vendors like Jonckers, all that care is an investment well-made because the payoff comes at events just like VinylCon!. With a world as expansive as music, there is always something to learn and appreciate, even for lifelong vinyl devotees. 

“My favorite part [about VinylCon!] is that there’s just so much that you can learn,” Jonckers said. “I’ll never know everything about music. It’s impossible. And my favorite thing with working with records is when I look up something … and I love that it’s always the one that you wouldn’t think would be something that’s worth so much online.”

VinylCon! is also a place for vinyl collectors in all stages of their collecting journey. As with any hobby, knowledge requires research. And with vinyl, there are tons of considerations to make before even thinking about buying a record.

“It’s a different world I never knew existed. Doing the research on the records, it’s an education,” said Ruth Witt, a customer at VinylCon! who had been getting into vinyl over the past three-and-a-half years. “You have to know the pressing, the year, the artist, the quality — the quality makes a difference — and how much you want to pay.”

Vinyl is one of those hobbies that intersect at a swarm of different sectors of life — art and entertainment, business, history, science, the list goes on. Not to mention, collecting vinyl isn’t a cheap hobby. 

The average price of a single record is around $20, and a valuable record — meaning a popular music genre by a well-known artist in good condition with a dozen other specific qualities — can range from $500 to $3,000.

It isn’t rare for a product’s market price to decrease over time — it’s seen in cars and technology. Something uniquely fascinating about vinyl collecting is that vinyl’s economic relationship with time is completely unpredictable. Contingent upon the quality and type of record, vinyls can even increase in price as time goes by. At VinylCon!, even the most seasoned hobbyists were bargaining with vendors arguing over price, genre importance, record condition and the like.

“There’s so much money in the records. Something that I like about [vinyl] is that it’s a hobby that you can kind of get your money back out of,” Jonckers said. “It’s something you can resell.”

And at such a large gathering of vinyl enthusiasts like VinylCon!, what better place to resell, trade or buy for a good deal?

“There are lots of events where they sell records, but not like [VinylCon!],” Witt said. “There are a lot more vendors, for one, and there are more vendors from out of state that come … It really is a beautiful hobby. It’s an expensive hobby, but it’s a hobby that you’ll never lose money on.”

It isn’t just the money that fuels vinyl collecting, but rather the sense of adventure from finding a personally valuable record in stacks of less intriguing vinyls, digging around for that one really special album or song, even if it’s just a favorite. 

“Digging, that’s the fun part,” Witt said. “They buy in bulk a lot of times, these vendors. And so sometimes they have a gem they don’t know they have in there and if you find it, it’s like finding a diamond. … I just came to dig and have fun.”

Beyond the money and fine details about measuring record quality or artist, the most important aspect of VinylCon! is the clear love of music. 

“Records are more of a hobby, because I’m a teacher,” Garcia said. “Me and my wife are just big music lovers, so collecting records kind of comes naturally if you really love music. So, owning your music physically and playing it at the house and stuff like that, it’s really the best.”

At the event, there was music playing constantly, vendors selling thousands of stacks of records and listening stations with turntables and headphones. Literally every corner of that floor breathed, talked and walked music. And perhaps the most palpable part of the experience was the sheer strength of the community and the loyalty the customers had for the craft and art they loved so much. 

“I’m just really excited to watch people in their element and just see the excitement on everybody’s face when they find what they’re looking for,” Rewold said. “It really is a fun community to be a part of.”