The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

hey guys, I was going through my collection this morning trying to decide what to listen to, and I remembered I have quite a few silvertone records

are these sought after? I have only seen them here and there, they dont seem too common... most of them are in original sleeves as well.

As you can see from the sleeve, Silvertone was Sears' house brand. There are certainly some collectible Silvertone records, but overall it's just another semi-common label. And I would assume that most of the recorded material was leased or licensed from other sources too.

Yellow Dog Blues is a particularly good title...

As far as collectibility goes, titles and condition are the two most important items on common label records. Sears made millions of them, but most titles aren't all that great, so if you find some good ones that makes them desirable...

alrighty!

What are some lesser seen labels that collectors look for?

ANY TITLE on Black Patti, Black Swan, Paramount, Gennett Electrobeam, Herwin and a number of other labels too numerous to mention. I should mention that the possibility of randomly running into these labels is next to none, unless through other collectors for high prices... This is a whole 'nother area of serious collecting that requires a lot of studying and research to even begin to get an idea of this specific topic. Do some GOOGLE searches and get educated, just in case you hit the motherlode...

There is no way to even explain the complexities of this market...
Naucks Vintage Records is a good starting place to get familiar with collectibility of certain labels and titles: https://www.78rpm.com
This page is another source of info: http://www.thevinylguide.com/episodes/e ... -tefteller

Many Paramounts are of common fare and not worth much. Distinct from the "race series".

Curt A wrote:Yellow Dog Blues is a particularly good title...

As far as collectibility goes, titles and condition are the two most important items on common label records. Sears made millions of them, but most titles aren't all that great, so if you find some good ones that makes them desirable...

Not so fast.

Quite a few of these as well as "Challenge", "Champion", and "Supertone" are Gennett pressings, often under pseudonyms. You really need a discography like Rust if you want to seriously collect these.

Wolfe wrote:Many Paramounts are of common fare and not worth much. Distinct from the "race series".

Same with Gennett Electrobeam... waltzes and Ralph Waldo Emerson organ records come to mind, along with a lot of "popular vocals" in this series.

52089 wrote:As you can see from the sleeve, Silvertone was Sears' house brand. There are certainly some collectible Silvertone records, but overall it's just another semi-common label. And I would assume that most of the recorded material was leased or licensed from other sources too.

For the era of the discs shown Sears relied on quite a few sources for pressings: https://78rpm.club/record-labels/silvertone/ Quality is generally good. They offered a reasonably diverse selection of sides, but the biggest customer for Sears products was the rural market, so you get a lot of quite conservative selections, some "Old Time" music, and very tame "Hill Billy" type music such as Vernon Dalhart.

The first generation Silvertone records were single sided with orange labels and used Columbia masters. I have a few of these. IIRC, they are of things like Arthur Colins and very typical of what one might expect. I would tend to doubt any of them are asking anything on the collector market.