Record collecting has never been hotter.
Discogs.com, the de facto online vinyl bible, has a Top 50 list of the most expensive records sold to mere mortals, which range from the obscure (a 2008 12-inch single by Scaramanga Silk that sold on the site for US$27,000) to the legendary (Prince’s mysterious The Black Album, a single Canadian-pressed copy that went for US$25,000). But that’s pocket change for some collectors.
A copy of John Lennon‘s album, Double Fantasy, owned by his assassin, Mark David Chapman, and autographed by Lennon himself, sold at an auction in 1999 for US$150,000. A first-pressing fully autographed copy of The Beatles‘ Sgt. Pepper went for US$290,500 in 2013. And a copy of The White Album, once owned by Ringo Starr — serial number 0000001 — sold for US$790,0000 in 2015.
But these were all records once commercially available. There’s an even higher category that features special singles and albums with production limited to one (and in a special case, two) copies.
The record that gave birth to rock ’n’ roll
On July 18, 1953, an 18-year-old truck driver dropped into Sun Records in Memphis to record a song for his mother as a birthday present. Side one was a version of the 1948 song My Happiness, while side two was his rendition of That’s When Your Heartache Begins. When he was finished and paid his $4, he received one copy of a 10-inch 78 RPM acetate. That young truck driver’s name was Elvis Presley, and this was his first-ever recording. Given what happened next, this can be considered the Big Bang of rock ’n’ roll.
What happened to this record next is unclear, although it seems to have been kept locked away in a bank vault for years. Then, in January 2015, Jack White bought it for US$300,000. It was played once, so it could be digitized and made available. Jack has the original stored somewhere very, very safe and will most likely never part with it.
The record that eventually gave birth to the most important band ever
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Sometime in the spring or summer of 1958, the five members of The Quarrymen went to Phillips Sound Recording Service in Liverpool — really just the front room of recordist Percy Phillips house — and ran through the Buddy Holly song, That’ll Be the Day.
Side two, In Spite of All the Danger, is more significant because it’s an original song written by two of the Quarrymen, Paul McCartney and George Harrison. John played on the record, too, as did pianist John Lowe and drummer Colin Hanton. The single-copy-only shellac-on-metal acetate was all they could afford. It cost the princely sum of about £1 (roughly £14 today), so each member took turns with it at home, keeping it for a week at a time.
Eventually, it was left with John Lowe, who kept it squirrelled away for the next 25 years. When he tried to sell it at auction in 1981, McCartney stepped in and bought it. It was transferred to magnetic tape, had the audio cleaned up, and then reproduced 50 copies, which were then given to family and friends. The original remains with McCartney. In the unlikely event it were to be sold at auction, the starting price would be $250,000 and would probably sell for several times that.
The special record featuring Bob Dylan covering Bob Dylan
Blowin’ in the Wind was one of Bob Dylan‘s earliest hits, first appearing on his 1962 album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Fast-forward to 2o22 when producer T Bone Burnett proposed that Dylan record another version for his new analogue disc format called Ionic Original. This new disc wasn’t pressed on vinyl but a new type of acetate created with Gorilla Glass, the same glass used for mobile phones. Burnett claims that, unlike original acetates or even vinyl records, an Ionic Original can be played thousands of times without coming close to wearing out.
It’s a fantastic idea that is scalable for commercial production, but tooling such a pressing plant is prohibitively expensive, so all we’ve got is this one-of-one Dylan recording. It sold for US$1.8 million to a private collector in 2022.
The CD that Wu-Tang Clan created as a protest art project
Wu’s RZA was convinced by superfan and future Wu-Tang clan producer Cilvarinz that the group needed to make a statement regarding how music piracy and streaming had devalued music. Why couldn’t Wu-Tang Clan create a CD that would be so beautiful and rare that it would be the musical equivalent of a Picasso?
The result was Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, a one-copy-only double CD set inside a precision-made silver and nickel package that came with a 174-page book crafted by a Serbian master bookbinder. When it was originally sold at auction in 2015, the surprise successful bidder was the highly unlikeable hedge fund pharma bro, Martin Shkreli, infamous for raising the price of a kidney disease drug from US$1.50 a pill to US$30. Given that patients needed to take between 10 and 15 pills a day, this was unconscionable. He then raised the price on an HIV/AIDS drug from US$13.50 to US$750 a pill. But because he won the auction fair and square with a successful bid of US$2 million, there was nothing the Wu-Tang Clan could do.
But then Shkreli was arrested by the DOJ on charges of securities fraud and had his assets seized, including the Shaolin CD. The government then sold it in 2021 to a crypto collective called PleasrDAO for US$4 million, which then sold pieces of the album via NFTs (remember those?). At last word, the future of Shaolin is tied up in lawsuits and countersuits involving PleasrDAO, Shkreli, RZA and Cilvaringz. Where is the disc now? Unknown.
The two discs no human will ever possess
When NASA launched the two Voyager spacecrafts in 1977, each carried a special phonograph disc made of gold, a metal that can survive the hostilities of interstellar space. The discs feature 116 images and a series of sounds, ranging from greetings in 55 languages to a barking dog, a sample of Morse code and a sample of astronomer Carl Sagan laughing. There’s music, too, from cultures around the world, with the United States being represented by the only rock song, Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode.
As of February 2026, Voyager 1 is just shy of 16 billion miles away, while Voyager 2 is 13.3 billion miles out there. That’s a bit far for even the most dedicated record collector, and therefore impossible to price out. But in 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will be within 1.6 light-years of Gliese 445, a star in the constellation Camelopardalis. So if there are habitable planets with record-collecting ETs in the area …
Fun fact: The Beatles allegedly had a chance for Here Comes the Sun to be placed on the Golden Record, but they couldn’t work out a licensing agreement … but to whom, exactly? Some alien civilization?
