When a record changes hands, its history has always disappeared with it. The new owner might be told it’s been well cared for. They have no way to verify that. The seller might know exactly how many times it’s been cleaned, every treatment it’s received, and how many plays it’s had since it was new — but that knowledge lives in their head, and it doesn’t travel with the album.
VRT now changes that.
Introducing the Vinyl Provenance Record
The Vinyl Provenance Record is a public, permanent link that shows an album’s complete play and care history — every play logged, every clean recorded, every Record Restore treatment documented. No login is required to view it. It can be shared with anyone: a buyer, a fellow collector, an insurance assessor, a family member who one day inherits the collection.
What the record shows:
- Total plays (including any estimated pre-VRT plays entered during album setup)
- Number of times the disc has been cleaned
- Number of Record Restore treatments received
- Years — or months — the album has been owned
- Dates of the most recent play, clean, and treatment
Every data point is built from entries made at the time they happened. Not reconstructed. Not estimated after the fact. Logged in the normal course of using VRT — the same log you’re building for your own tracking purposes, now shareable in a single link.
Why this matters for the second-hand market
Serious collectors have always tried to assess a record’s condition before buying — visually, aurally, by reputation of the seller. What they have rarely been able to do is see the actual care record: whether the disc was cleaned before each play, how many plays it has had, and when it was last treated.
The Vinyl Provenance Record makes that information verifiable and portable. A seller who has been logging plays and cleans in VRT since they acquired an album has already built the provenance record without doing anything additional. Generating the link is one step. From that point, the history is public, permanent, and doesn’t require the buyer to take anyone’s word for it.
For albums of significant value — original pressings, limited editions, out-of-print titles — a documented care history is a meaningful part of the case for the asking price. It is also the kind of record that matters for insurance purposes, and for any collector who has thought about the capital gains implications of selling appreciated records. A care record that predates the sale is part of the asset documentation.
The provenance card
For records sold in person — through a record fair, a local collector network, or direct from a collection — VRT produces a clean print layout for the provenance record, with the link URL clearly displayed. Slip it into the sleeve at point of sale. The buyer has a physical reference to the digital record, and the link remains active and verifiable indefinitely.
How to generate a provenance link
Open the album in VRT. Scroll to the Vinyl Provenance Record section at the bottom of the Album Edit page. Click Generate provenance link.
VRT creates a unique, permanent link for that album. If you generate again for the same album, you receive the same link — no duplicates are created.
Copy the link to share via any channel — message, email, or listing description. On a mobile device, tap Share to use the native share sheet.
Generating a provenance link is available on all licence tiers, including Trial.
Building a record worth sharing
A provenance record is only as useful as the history behind it. VRT builds that history automatically from the plays and cleans you are already logging — and where an album has been sent to SCA for cleaning and treatment, those events are documented in VRT as part of the same record.
The collectors who will benefit most from the Vinyl Provenance Record are the ones who started logging accurately from the beginning. If that’s not yet where you are, the best time to start is now.
Written by Stephen Price, founder of Secret Chord Analogue.