Articles — collector guides

Album art helped define the arrival of new music during its heyday, which ran roughly from the later 60s to the 80s when vinyl albums ruled music sales worldwide. While smaller formats such as cassettes, CDs and later streaming imposed size and format limitations on artwork since then, the contributions of visual artists to herald the arrival of new music is still fondly remembered by many. One of the most prolific groups of artists worked under the name Hipgnosis. The main partners behind Hipgnosis were Peter Christopherson, Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson. Freelance designers Richard Evans, George Hardie and Richard Manning...

While RIAA awards (those made by the official U.S. record industry trade association, the Recording Industry Association of America) are arguably the best-selling record awards among collectors, there are other choices in the marketplace which can bring similar joy, memories and value to one's collection. These awards are produced under the authorization of similar recording industry trade organizations in various other countries whose industries have created such an organization and who issue sales awards to certify sales in those countries. There are a couple of ways these awards can add depth to a collection. One is that some artists have only done...

MusicGoldmine.com has recently acquired, from numerous different sources around the world including Stones bassist Bill Wyman himself, a varied selection of truly stellar, one-of-a-kind Rolling Stones memorabilia items. Wyman is well-known to be a serious and committed collector of memorabilia from his own group, with which he played bass and provided other musical contributions on every album and toured the world with for over three decades from 1962-1993. He recently decided to part with the lion's share of his vast collection and we were fortunate enough to acquire some wonderful pieces. In addition to the Wyman items, we have scoured the...

One of the tricky parts of collecting RIAA record awards is avoiding the fakes that do occasionally exist in the marketplace. Here are five tips that can help you avoid buying a fake RIAA award: 1. Certification: Does the certification date versus the award type make sense? This can be a very tricky area because a recording is not certified officially by the RIAA until the record label submits the paperwork. In some cases, there can be years-long gaps before Platinum was issued on recordings which in reality quickly sold numbers that were at the Platinum level. This is fairly common...

In an auction held today June 20, 2020 at Julien's Auctions a bidder bought Kurt Cobain's acoustic guitar used during the infamous MTV Unplugged performance. The purchase cost the lucky buyer a record-setting $6,010,000. The buyer, whose name was announced publicly as the auction concluded in a somewhat unusual occurrence, was Australian Peter Freedman, Founder and CEO of RODE Microphones. The Nirvana MTV Unplugged concert was recorded on November 18, 1993 in MTV's New York City studios and telecast on December 16. The recording went on to be a best seller for Nirvana. The guitar itself is a 1959 Martin...