For a long time, Discog[ue]s has been the place to find out about music releases (and more recently, buy preowned music media). The site is pretty much Wikipedia for vinyl, and even goes as far as to catalogue stuff like magazine cover CDs. The marketplace is pretty active, and you can get hold of some pretty rare CDs and vinyl. I even managed to get hold of the original compilation that GTA III’s MSX FM radio station was based on.
Now, the Discogs team have rolled out a brand new site, aiming to catalogue all sorts of electronic music equipment. Gearogs is still very fledgeling (and as such, sparse), but already shapes up to be a useful tool, much like Equipboard does. At the moment, it’s all about getting as much gear onto the site as possible, but much like Discogs, Comicogs, vinylhub, et al, there is no doubt a marketplace on the way.
There’s a wide range of categories already being filled on the site, right down to different turntable carts and needles that have appeared on the market over the years. You can check out everything from effects units to speakers, and mixing desks. There’s also a random page link for some pot luck.
My thoughts
We’ve covered Equipboard a while ago, which seems to do a lot of the work that gearogs.com is trying to, and it does it in a slick and simple interface, but it really doesn’t have the clout nor experience that the Discogs team have gained. The biggest difference is that gearogs is purely about the gear, whereas Equipboard also aims to keep track of which well-known artist uses what hardware.
Ultimately, I think the strength in this new site would be the potential of the marketplace to bring together people selling and buying classic music hardware. My personal favourite that I came across is the old school Fisher-Price Phonograph record player from 1983 (though they go back further than that), which just oozes retro cool and hits home with the current portablist trend. The synthesiser section is also fun to browse, with some weird and wonderful stuff added.
Your thoughts
Does gearogs.com sound useful? Would you use a marketplace if they had one?
Check out the growing database on gearogs.com.
Anywhere that I can keep tabs on or find old vestax gear is a winner for me! Good luck to it
Especially a market place would be interesting.
Glad that Disqus is back btw.
That would be logical. Otherwise is just a big community maintained gear database, with no revenue stream.
Oh and you’re welcome. It makes more sense. I just wish I could make it look more like the main site.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0a6e0558f10aa2a0a5e0c7444592a23f13e0393f30a12707593e76f4df67c118.jpg I can change fonts and suchlike in a browser live preview, but there’s no way to get it to stick in theme CSS. Even using !important in the CSS doesn’t work. Bugger.
Gearogs marketplace may also be a great place to find spare parts, hopefully they have a solution for such listings.
When I first (and not very carefully) read the facebook post I thought the gear data base would be your next project, Mark. That would have made a lot of sense knowing that you have checked out more gear in person than most people on the planet.
Having digged through gearogs, I’m a little disappointed.
At this point there is not much to see besides few pictures and copied PR descriptions of some of the equipment.
Categories seem not to be chosen wisely (all in one controllers under “DJ Mixers”, no DJ CD / media player section, etc). There are no ratings or reviews. In general there is very little value in this site, so far. Hopefully, this will change.
We did talk about it internally — to create the most comprehensive DJ gear database ever. But then I realised the sheer scale of such an undertaking. We don’t have the resource to do what needs to be done, let alone massive folly projects with no real return on investment.
You could generate some income from DJ Worx. I still don’t have cool slipmats (besides the Technics ones) and record weights. Hint, hint :)
Besides that you have plenty of press material from the last years, reviews en masse and good industry contacts to get the missing stuff.
I think its a great idea. A centralized spot to buy and sell gear and spare parts would be very welcome.
I love it. I am fascinated by DJ and sound gear. I look forward to checking it out.
There is already http://www.hifishark.com that does à great job !!
Just started collecting 2 channel mixers that I would have seen or used over the last 30 years and anything else with eBay is a help.