I have bought a record I already owned four times. Not the same record four times — four different records I turned out to have, which I found out at home, holding the second copy.

That is the trade. Nobody who deals is embarrassed by it. You buy fast in a room where somebody else is also buying fast, and the cost of the occasional double is the price of not standing there thinking.

I mention it because it cannot happen to me any more and I want to be precise about what I lost.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to. A record cost twelve dollars and it arrived sorted. That is the part nobody says. Somebody had already decided it was worth pressing. Somebody had decided it was worth stocking. Somebody had put it in a bin, and the bin had a word on it, and the word was wrong about half the time, and being wrong half the time is an enormous amount of information.

The bin was the product. The disc was a delivery mechanism for the bin.

I used to be able to walk into a shop I had never been in and know, in about four minutes, whether the person behind the counter knew anything. Not by talking to them. By looking at where they had put things. If the reissues were separated out, that told me one thing. If a record I knew was filed under a country rather than a decade, that told me another. The whole shop was an argument and I could read it from the door.

Now everything is available and none of it is filed.

I do not think this is a complaint about quality. There is more good music reachable from where I am sitting than existed in every shop I have ever been in put together, and I mean that, and the people who say otherwise are usually saying something about themselves.

It is a complaint about who is doing the sorting.

Because it is still being done. That has not stopped. Somebody still has to decide that a record from 1981 that did not sell is worth putting next to a record from last year, and that the two of them together mean something, and that a person might want them in that order.

It used to be a job. It was not a good job and it did not pay well and it was frequently done by a man with strong opinions about German pressings. But it was a position, held by a person, in a building, and the twelve dollars paid for it.

Now it is me. At two in the morning. For nothing.

I want to be careful, because this is where these pieces usually go wrong. I am not owed anything. Nobody promised me a shop. I do the sorting because I like it and I would do it if they paid me to stop.

What I am saying is narrower and it is the only thing I actually know about.

A price well off market means something is wrong. That is not a moral position, it is a working rule, and I have used it for twenty years to avoid buying things I would regret. When a scarce record is priced too low, the people who show up are dealers reading the signal. They are not collectors who love it. The price is telling you something and the something is rarely good.

Everything, for the cost of a sandwich, every month, forever, is a price well off market.

I am not going to tell you what changed to make it that cheap, because I do not know, and I notice that the people who do know have not said either.

But it did not get that cheap because the sorting got easier.

The Eleffant writes on music. He deals records and has done for twenty years, which is a disclosure and not a credential.