Discogs
👤 Kevin Lewandowski (Intel programmer and vinyl obsessive who catalogued his own techno records in 2000 — scratched his own itch, took no VC.)🌐 siteLinkedIn
Collectors built the definitive music database for free; Discogs layered a marketplace on it and takes 9% of every sale.
Will it work? · our read
Un-buyable data. The catalog is the moat: 25 years of collector labor no one can buy or rebuild. The marketplace merely taxes it. The risk: it rides one physical-music niche.
01How the money moves
Collectors submit release data for free — the catalog grows
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Sellers list records against that catalog, free to list
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A record sells — Discogs takes a 9% fee
02The numbers
15.6M+Stateditems sold
2023
the sentence on the page
for 17.8% of the global market last year. Global physical sales through the Discogs marketplace totaled 15.6M pieces of physical music worldwide. Discogs data confirms that vinyl was the most popular…
Discogs discloses unit volume, not dollar revenue; the 9% fee is first-party. 2023 analysis
Private (Zink Media); we estimate from disclosed unit volume x 9% fee — not a first-party dollar figure.
🔒
You have the verdict. Members get the work behind it.
- The CENTS scorecard — where it's strong, where it's soft
- The founder's key move, and the counter-move
- How it could die — the evidence, and how sure we are
- The case against our own call
- A 🚀 launchpad prompt — the case, as a plan for your business
We rate our own confidence — and argue against ourselves. Nobody else in this category does.
Sources always public on all 560 cases · cancel anytime · 14-day refund
See a full teardown, free → ImportYetiSourcesSources last checked 23 August 2026
Vice — How Discogs Dragged Record Collecting Into the 21st CenturyWikipedia — DiscogsDiscogs — 2023 Marketplace AnalysisDiscogs — Selling Fee Update 2023Billboard — Discogs fee backlash and advisory board
Revenue is an ESTIMATE, not disclosed. Discogs (Zink Media) is private and reports unit volume, not dollars. The New York Times reported about $100M in records sold on Discogs in 2015 (via Vice); at the 8-9% fee that implies roughly $8M then. Orders roughly doubled by 2020-2023 (about 8-9m/yr) at higher vinyl prices, so we peg current marketplace fee revenue near $30M plus advertising — derived, not first-party. The founder story, 8->9% fee, 2005 marketplace launch, and the first marketplace's failure-then-relaunch are documented (Vice, Discogs, Wikipedia). No drama fabricated; the 2023 fee revolt is real (Billboard, DJ Mag). We never score you.