Are records released as promotional copies worth more or less than the official releases?

promo. but tricky, all about the timing and the market. ever collect baseball cards? remember supply and demand? If you have a hot band, limited promo release record = $$$. Hot band + tons of promo records = $$, average band limited or plentiful = $... its all about the legacy and the scareness of your product… :)

So the price really isn’t correlated to the official releases at all, more how many promos were released and how big the name is?

the rarer the product, and the less availabilty of your promo record increases the demand and price… however, like gambling, if you have a hot release of someone like Lady Gaga or Drake that no one else has can be worth much more now than later… they could end up having a shitty ass career making the initial promos worthless…. Consider Promo’s like stocks lol

my b, insead of stocks, I meant IPO’s lol…. like really, and I have a masters in finance lol

Okay, my confusion is this -

I assume a promo copy is circulated to radio stations, etc before the actual release of the record. I’m talking about records from the 50s to 80s, btw, not sure if it matters. And therefore, I assume less promo copies are made than the official release records. I would then think that because less promo copies exist, they are worth more than the official release version. Comparing the versions should eliminate the artist as a variable because it is the same artist and album for both, and if promo copies are always made in smaller volume than official release, that would logically eliminate that variable as well. On the other hand, I seem to have heard somewhere that promo copies are worth less. Any or all of the assumptions I’m making here could be wrong; I’m really not sure.

I don’t really care what promo copies are worth relative to each other, more what they are worth relative to the regular version of the same album that people would have been able to buy at a music store.

I have a bunch of old records, some of which are promos, and I am trying to price them. There’s not much to go on besides what other people are selling the same, non-promo album for.

ha ha sorry for the confusion.. generally speaking, promos should always be priced higher than regular releases due to its nature of “being a promo.” An obsessed fan will always pay a premium for something another fan wished they had.. worst case scenario, if the band totally sucks, you should get fair market value matching the regular pricing… its all about scarcity, have any product thta people want

Thanks that makes sense. And nice avatar :P