Just before the start of the year, I submitted four Public Enemy vinyl records to Vintage Media Grading for review and slabbing. I received them back today after much anticipation. I'll be posting my results in the coming days, but I wanted to use this post as an overall review of my experience with @Vintage_Media_Grading. Important note: The opinions expressed herein are my own and VMG hasn't asked me to write a review.

Shown here is a sealed copy of the 1990 single "Welcome to the Terrordome", which I acquired last year for $30. I love this song because it represents one of the high water marks of Public Enemy's production style and Chuck D's lyrical talent. Albums are great but I almost exclusively collect singles for a few reasons: First, an incredible song deserves to stand alone as a musical achievement; second, musicians put as much effort into the cover art and photos as they did an album; and lastly, as a kid of the '90s, I'm nostalgic for those memories of going into Sam Goody or KMart and grabbing that amazing single you heard on the radio.

My copy graded out at a 7.5, which was broken down to a 7.0 cover, 8.0 spine, and 8.0 seal, each of which is very fair. The subgrade transparency is similar to Beckett sports card grading in that you can see the overall stats and know how your grade was derived. VMG slabs are awesome. They display like museum pieces and they're built like tanks. I feel like I could run this thing over and it wouldn't break.

The total cost to grade this record was roughly $50 all-in, which included grading plus shipping. Going back to a sports card grading comparison, I paid roughly $30 per card with PSA, so the cost scales with the added size and shipping considerations. The turnaround time from VMG was also reasonable - in fact, I submitted my vinyls the same day I submitted a stack of baseball cards to PSA and I coincidentally received them back on the same day! All in all I'm very happy with my experience and will probably submit some more records as I accumulate additional ones in the future.

Music grading is a new concept so there are tons of question marks for the future. The vinyl collecting community is by and large a lovably stubborn group and I'm sure most of them would hate that I rendered a record unplayable for eternity. Even so, I believe collectibles grading as a whole is an expanding market and that music grading will attract collectors like myself who don’t necessarily sit around listening to vinyl (did I mention that I don’t even own a record player?!). I also think music grading will eventually pull in the vinylheads once they realize that the primary focus of music grading is to slab the vinyls you'd never put into the record player because they're either sealed or too rare to risk damaging.

Even if music grading never catches on, however, I now own a stack of special records that can display beautifully on my wall – and isn’t that the ultimate point of collecting?

I saw this promotional slide of Public Enemy on eBay and thought the scene depicted looked familiar. I researched and quickly realized it must’ve been taken during the photo shoot of their album “Fear of a Black Planet”. I uploaded the photo that appears on the back of the album vinyl as comparison.

I did a deep dive into how promotional film slides are made and this is essentially a copy of a copy of the original negative. No clue how many of these were made or still exist, but I can’t find the regular photo version of this shot anywhere online which is interesting. Probably not worth much and I probably overpaid, but just a fun little addition to my collection.

In my mailbox today was a 7” vinyl promo copy of the song “Public Enemy #1” by Public Enemy. Released in 1987, this is the first single that they distributed as a group. White label demo copies such as these were usually the first batch off the press and were sent to radio stations, DJs, media outlets, etc.
Did they only make 500 of these? 5,000? 10,000? Probably no way to know, but the fact that this is one of the first Public Enemy vinyl singles ever pressed is amazing to me. I don’t know why promo copies aren’t a bigger thing in the vinyl world.