Academy Records has been buying used vinyl and cassette tapes in New York City since 2001, when Academy LP’s first opened its doors at 415 East 12th Street in the East Village before relocating in 2008 to its current East Village location. Run by Cory and Mike, the shop built its reputation on a simple pitch: the fairest and most honest price for a record collection, backed by a staff that actually knows what it is looking at across an unusually wide range of genres.
The Manhattan shop buys and sells across rock, jazz, soul and funk, punk, metal, reggae, hip hop, disco, house, techno, and experimental music, along with music adjacent memorabilia such as vintage concert t-shirts, posters, and magazines. That genre range matters for anyone trying to sell a mixed collection, since a shop that only wants one narrow category often ends up lowballing everything outside its comfort zone, while Academy’s staff can evaluate soul, techno, and punk records with equal seriousness in the same visit.
Academy Records operates seven days a week from 11 in the morning until 7 in the evening, a schedule that holds at both its Manhattan location and its sister store, Academy Records Annex, which started in Williamsburg in 2003, moved to Greenpoint in 2013, and has since relocated again to 242 Banker Street in Brooklyn. Having two active locations under one name gives the business a wider net for both buying and selling across the city’s two biggest vinyl shopping corridors, the East Village and North Brooklyn, without diluting the hands on, specialist approach either shop applies to evaluating a collection.
For sellers with large collections that are impractical to haul into either storefront, Academy sends its own team out on house calls throughout the tri-state area and beyond, evaluating and buying collections on site rather than requiring everything to be boxed and transported first. The shop also offers bulk and wholesale pricing on used vinyl for buyers looking to stock their own inventory, and it maintains an active presence on Discogs, eBay, and Fora alongside a Mixcloud account where staff share curated mixes pulled from the kind of records passing through the shop day to day.
Reachable at 718-218-8200 or 212-780-9166, with direct contact available through cory@academy-lps.com, Academy Records has spent more than two decades building a reputation in New York as a straightforward, knowledgeable buyer of used vinyl, one that treats a jazz collection, a punk collection, and a techno collection with the same level of seriousness. Between its long running East Village storefront, its Brooklyn Annex, in person house calls, and daily seven day a week hours, Academy Records stands as one of New York City’s most established destinations for selling and buying used vinyl and cassette tapes across nearly every genre imaginable.
