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
→
Sellers list records against that catalog, free to list
→
A record sells — Discogs takes a 9% fee
02The numbers
19M+
catalog releases
Wikipedia
15.6M
items sold, 2023
Discogs
9%
seller fee
Discogs
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.
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(demo: preview the full teardown)Sourcesupdated · daily
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.