Reggio Emilia used-vinyl shop that buys thousands of LPs a year and washes every one on a VPI machine.

Shop: Planet Music (S. N. C.)
Address: Via Antonio Vivaldi, 10, 42124 Reggio Emilia RE, Italy
Town: Reggio Emilia, Italy
Established: 1994
Formats: Vinyl, CDs, DVDs
Crates: Rock, Jazz, Pop, Electronic
In the shop: Buys collections, Mail order
Opening hours: Tu-Fr 09:30-12:30,15:00-19:00; Sa 10:00-18:30

Planet Music opened in December 1994, when friends and people in the trade told the owners that opening an all-genres vinyl shop was a mad idea. Every year they buy thousands of near-mint LPs from private sellers, collectors and audiophiles, from original sixties pressings to later reissues. Records get washed on V.P.I. cleaning machines and listened to again: the perfect ones go up on the site, the rest are sold in the shop at symbolic prices, about a third of what a clean copy fetches. Plenty of LPs sit at 5 euro and the bulk stay under 10. Since 2008 thousands of compact discs arrive every month too, because a lot of rock, jazz, pop and nineties and 2000s electronica never came out on vinyl at all. Mail-order buyers get a guarantee: if a disc has a problem, the refund lands in the next parcel.