Guardian article: Why Elvis memorabilia is plummeting in value

There is "that". It's just not helpful to the OP which I thought was the whole point of the exercise. Anyway enough said.....

 

Which was kind of the Beatles' point in numbering them...the irony of a "limited numbered edition" of an album that had millions pressed

 

I think that "collecting" this stuff hit its peak when eBay was fun, back around 2000-2003. We went through the 'Goldmine' era (80's-'90s), where collectors would bid via snail mail on albums, there were record shows, and the collecting market was front and center. Today, our collections sit there but really, if we got to the point where we wanted to liquidate what we have, we'd have a very hard time getting rid of most of the stuff for anywhere near what we think its worth, or what it was worth back 20 years ago.

There will always be people who want to collect stuff, but the millennial's and such are not big collectors of anything. There are very few treasures of the 1990's and 2000's. Things like coins, stamps, records....the stuff the baby boomers collected, are of no interest to the youngsters, other than what they can get for them.

When's the last time a little kid came up to you and asked to check the coins in your pocket to see if there was one they needed for their collection?

 

I don't think anyone is buying worn vinyl, unless it's dirt cheap.

Looking at Discogs, when you get to near mint media for a Beatles VI mono, prices start around $37 bucks and go up from there. Seems to me to have some demand.

But I wouldn't be surprised at all that sales for increasingly older artists are drying up for ANY format. I'm shopping around for vintage Les Paul Capitol vinyls, and I'm surprised how reasonable the prices are for mint and near mint pressings.

The world moves on, it seems.

 

In one of the vinyl shops I frequent they had bins of Elvis records available

 

It's a combination of the audience for the albums aging out, and the fact that they pressed millions of the albums and most people who want them already have them by now.

 

Graceland still rakes in the millions !

 

It' s the same generational drop off that happened during the 90s with doo wop and 50s singles/albums, the generation that coveted them passed on or were no longer interested but had bidded them high and left them there with no other buyer interested, so the prices plummeted.

 

I was going to sell my Roy Rogers collection but I'm probably a little late to the game.

 

I say yes.
I had an extensive collection of original sixties
Beatles stuff and have sold it all off.
It reached its peak in the late nineties.
There is no way the next generation will care to spend hundreds of dollars for set of Beatles Remco dolls.
As for records, time will tell.
But the market will definitely shrink.

 

I think part of it, too, for Elvis is that he made too many albums. Every soundtrack album he made was bad. And there's lots of them.

This is coming from a guy who spent his 40th birthday at Graceland

 

Fan bases die out... I mean why deny the obvious?

 

Blue Hawaii, King Creole and G.I. Blues are very good albums, in my opinion anyways.

 

Too bad that people who didn't grow up with an artist are not allowed to be interested in them.

 

Using only my own high school-aged children as a small focus group, there is clearly more receptivity to The Beatles among emerging generations than there is to Elvis. Enough to move the economic needle? Who knows? But the climax to this weekend's highest-grossing movie almost certainly included three minutes of Cat Stevens, so you never can tell.

 

Most 23 year old Elvis fans are not going to pay $200 for a rare Elvis record. They're going to download an Elvis album (or songs).

 

That was gonna be my point. The Beatles' canon is relatively brief and mercifully devoid of the sort of repackaging and recompiling to which most defunct acts are subjected.

Moreover, Elvis preceded the album-as-artistic-statement, initiated by the Beatles themselves. His LPs were more often than not slapdash product, in content and packaging. His catalog wasn't presented with any real care until the CD era.

 

You can thank Col. Tom Parker for the glut of albums, compilation albums, etc. He always wanted new Elvis product out there to sell.

 

I've come across many listings on eBay from sellers asking a king's ransom for beat up vinyl by the Beatles. Those records are pressed in the millions so unless they are in near mint or better condition I can see them vastly depreciate in the not so distant future.
The same can be said for all other recording acts that followed after Elvis.
The next generation of fans are content with streaming and listening to music on their phones sad to say.

 

I don't think that's a factor. Fans collect based on rarity, not quality.

The bulk of Elvis' fanbase is dying off, so lots of material is coming on the market that has been sitting in collections for years. Elvis has some younger fans, but not enough to maintain demand and replace all the fans dying off. Supply is increasing, demand is falling, so price goes down. It's simple.

The Beatles' first-generation fans are a few years younger than Elvis', and the Beatles were far more successful at recruiting new fans in the 70s and 80s. So for the present, there is demand for their stuff. Over the next ten years as first-generation fans die off and consequently more stuff comes on the market, the prices will probably decline some, but the presence of a significant amount of second and third generation fans will probably keep the bottom from totally falling out. Eventually though, Beatles records will lose their value too. It may be 20-30 years before that happens though. I guess it also depends on when people lose interest in vinyl records, something that will happen eventually.

 

Well, John Lennon once said that people would be listening to I Am The Walrus in 100 years. I believe him.

 

......and they'll be listening to Hound Dog too. Elvis' hits are ingrained in the culture.

 

This should come as no shock to anyone.

 

Yikes, this is getting all bent around.

ZEp has out sold Elton thus far, during the 70s they sold Equally as well as each other.

Then regarding your statement about fans of one band not being of the other, it is hard to tell, the really big numbers in sales did not come until the 90s as the catalogs were issued on cd, so it is very plausible everybody bought everything as catalogs enjoyed multi platinum gains unseen before.