Collecting guides

Record Grading… How to Read VG, VG+ and Near Mint

Updated 22 September 2026 · Published 21 September 2026

Where the grading scale came from, how each grade compares with Near Mint, why the sleeve is graded apart, and what to ask when two letters aren't enough.

Two copies of the same record, both graded VG+, can sound like different records. One plays with a faint hiss you stop hearing after a minute. The other ticks, once per revolution, for the whole of side one. Same two letters.

Most of the useful information sits in the sentence beside the grade, not in the two letters. A listing with no sentence beside it is telling you something as well.

Two letters that set the price

The scale nearly everyone uses came out of Goldmine magazine, written up by Tim Neely, who compiled the Goldmine Record Album Price Guide that dealers priced from for decades. It exists because the market had a problem, and the guide says so outright: it names “poor grading and a lack of consensus as to what constitutes a ‘Very Good Plus’ or ‘Near Mint’ record” as an obstacle to collecting itself.

So the scale was built to make prices comparable, and that origin still shapes it. Goldmine’s guides quote values for Near Mint copies and treat everything below as a fraction of that number. Discogs, which adopted the same standard for its marketplace, publishes those fractions outright.

A grade is therefore a price. Going from VG+ down to VG takes off about half the value, which is why grades drift upward, and why two letters deserve more scepticism than they usually get.

”Good does not mean bad”

The exclamation mark is Goldmine’s. Their point is that a Good copy will still play from start to finish without a skip, which is why it can stand in as a placeholder “until something better comes along”.

The catch is that everywhere else in life, good means fine. Here it sits three rungs down, at a tenth of a clean copy. A listing that leans on the word without describing the noise isn’t necessarily dishonest, but it does leave the optimism to you.

Near Mint is rarer than sellers think

Two things make Near Mint much harder to reach than most listings assume.

It isn’t graded on a curve. A record from 1957 has to meet the same standard as one from 2005, and age earns no allowance. The consequence is stark: Goldmine reckons that only 2 to 4 percent of the records left from the 1950s and 1960s still deserve Near Mint, which is the whole reason clean early copies cost what they do, even for titles that sold in their millions.

Near Mint also rules out things people forget to check. Writing and stickers on the label, obviously, but also spindle marks, the little scars left by dropping a record onto the platter without looking. A record pressed visibly off-centre isn’t Near Mint either, however clean, because that defect came from the plant.

Mint is stricter still. Goldmine’s position is that it “should never be used as a grade unless more than one person agrees”, and plenty of dealers won’t grade above Near Mint at all, on the reasonable grounds that nothing used is ever quite perfect.

The sleeve gets its own grade

A listing reading VG+/VG is grading two things. On Discogs the record comes first and the sleeve second, but read the field labels rather than trusting the order.

The guide gets unusually specific here, and the specifics are worth copying into your own habits. A VG+ cover may carry a seam split under an inch long at the bottom edge, which it calls the most vulnerable location: the seam that goes first on almost every jacket. A cover with a cut-out marking, the drill hole or clipped corner that marked deleted stock, can never be Near Mint, however clean the rest of it is.

Worn sleeve, clean record is the common case, the sleeve having taken the shelf while the record stayed in its inner. When the two grades differ, Goldmine’s rough-and-ready answer is to average the two prices.

Then check the inserts by name. An original printed inner sleeve and a plain white replacement both do the job, but a buyer paying for the first won’t accept the second, and gatefolds often arrive without their posters, and listings don’t always say so. Decide what you’re buying it for before any of this matters. A listening copy and a shelf copy are different purchases, and it’s entirely reasonable to want one and not care about the other.

Looked at, or listened to

Most records are graded visually, for the simple reason that a dealer may hold hundreds of thousands of them and hasn’t the time to play the stock. That makes a visual grade a prediction, and the guide is honest about how it fails.

Its most useful point is about era: records pressed up to about 1971 usually sound better than their surfaces suggest, and newer ones usually sound worse. Scratches and warps are easy to see. Groove wear from a cheap or badly aligned tonearm is subtle, and it’s the damage that ruins a record you were promised was clean.

The guide’s observation stops at 1989, so treat anything later as unproven rather than exempt. Either way the era tells you what to worry about. On an early pressing, alarming-looking scuffs often play through. On a record from the 1970s or 1980s, a sleeve that looks barely touched tells you less than you’d like.

Two tests help more than any listing description. The first is Goldmine’s own, taken from its definition of VG: a scratch deep enough to feel with a fingernail is deep enough to hear. Run a nail across the grooves, not along them.

The other is geometry. A mark crossing the grooves gets struck once per revolution, so at 33⅓ rpm you get a tick every 1.8 seconds, right through the side. Your ear finds that rhythm and refuses to let go of it. A broad scuff running along the groove, the kind that looks alarming in a photograph, can be silent.

So ask narrow questions. “How does it play?” invites “great”. Ask whether the whole side was played or sampled, whether any tick repeats, and whether there’s noise in the quiet passages, the intro and the fade, which is exactly where the guide says VG surface noise shows itself first. For a record that’s expensive or genuinely hard to replace, an unanswered question is a reason to wait for the next copy.

Japanese VG is not Western VG

Goldmine concedes the first wrinkle itself: VG+ is also written EX, for Excellent, and its upper reach gets called VG++ or E+. British and European sellers often use EX.

Japan runs a different ladder altogether, and this one catches people out. Snow Records, a long-running Japanese dealer, grades M / M− / EX / VG / G / F / P, plus B for the unplayable or broken, with no VG+ tier at all. EX occupies the slot where Goldmine puts VG+, so their VG sits below a Western VG+ rather than beside it. Read one as the other and you’ll be disappointed.

Japanese listings carry their own shorthand too, worth learning if you buy from there: soc for a sticker on the cover, woc for writing on it, and a no- prefix for anything absent, no-obi, no-insrt. That last one matters, because the obi, the printed paper strip wrapped around the spine, is often treated as a third graded component alongside disc and sleeve. Some specialists grade media, cover and obi separately, and won’t stock a Japanese pressing that arrived without its strip.

Sealed isn’t an answer

Sealed means nobody has opened it, and nobody has checked it. Neely lists four reasons to be careful before paying the premium: the album may have been re-sealed; the record inside may not be Near Mint; it may not be the pressing you want; and the wrong record may be inside altogether. He once opened a sealed LP by one MCA artist and found a different MCA artist in the jacket.

Buy sealed when the sealed object is the point. Don’t buy it expecting a guarantee about the sound, and settle what happens if you find a defect before you pay, because opening it ends that conversation.

Your own scale

When a record comes off the platter for the first time, write down two things: the grade you were sold, and the grade you’d give it. Note where the noise sits, whether it bothered you, and whether you’d buy from that seller again.

Twenty records in, you have a calibration. You’ll know which sellers run strict and which run hopeful, and that you stop hearing light crackle under dense rock but can’t forgive a single tick on solo piano.

Record by Record keeps that note with the copy you actually own, next to the pressing you identified and what the runout told you. So when two copies of one record turn up at the same price, you’re grading against your own ears instead of someone else’s abbreviation.