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.