It's a post modernism thing, everything sooner or later becomes collectibles. Comic magazines, Star Wars figures and (probably?) milk bottles.
It is nothing new, I’ve made a decent secondary income from buying and selling records since I was still a school kid 45 years ago! I’d argue it was actually far harder now as 20-25 years ago I could walk down any high st in the land and come back with more than I could physically carry that would go for good money, certainly multiples of what I paid. It kept me fairly comfortable through some quite financially challenging times and has always supplemented/funded my own collecting. These days the best buys tend to be new very limited editions. Forget RSD etc, that is largely a chump’s game, the good stuff is on Bandcamp and often limited to 300 or less. Buy right and you certainly have an increasing asset that you can also enjoy. Limited edition audiophile pressings are a surprisingly good buy too, some of my most valuable records are ‘70s-90s Nimbus, DCC, Classic Records etc. It never occurred to me they’d increase so well, I bought most of them because I couldn’t find a really decent 1st pressing even back then, (especially of the US stuff).
I can understand noobs to vinyl being really frustrated with the market today as basically they have zero chance of building a collection like mine, it is just way too expensive and hard to find mint examples, but in other ways it is surprisingly healthy. As an example back in the ‘80s no way in hell could I have found a copy of say Coltrane’s ALS as nice as the current Acoustic Sounds issue, or the countless Tone Poets etc without importing original stuff blind from the USA. I don’t think £25-35 for a really, really good record is outrageous at all, but I want genuinely high quality in all areas for that money. The thing that irks me is paying that money for something brand new that I’d only personally grade as an EX/EX or below, and sadly that still happens on occasions, though it is certainly better now than it was 10-15 years ago.
PS It is the same with guitars and hi-fi. Why would you buy something that is a depreciating asset when with a little intelligence you can enjoy something that also increases in value. Record collecting involves investing a fortune, but the way I do it that is far cheaper than even streaming as it is never dead money! I can pull so many records out of my collection that I paid £5-10 or whatever for and are now worth £25, 50, 100, 200, 500 or more.
