Crate Digger › About
About
Crate Digger is a record shop you can't buy anything in. You flip through a crate the way you would in a shop, pull a record out, turn it over, and when you want it, the price tag tells you where it's cheapest on vinyl, shipping included.
Who
I'm Eric Smilde. By day I'm a 3D motion designer (Cinema 4D and Redshift; the work is at ericsmilde.com). I also have a bachelor's degree in art and economics, with a focus on music management, which until this site had never been put to use. Crate Digger is where the two meet: the crate, the sleeves and the shop are built the way I'd build a shot, with a camera, a lamp over the bin and cardboard that bends; the numbers underneath are what the degree was for.
How the prices work
- Every record is a barcode first. Where we know a record's vinyl EAN, that's what we look for, so a shop's regular black LP is matched exactly. Coloured and limited pressings are shown with a label; box sets, deluxe and signed editions never count as the same record. Second-hand copies never count at all.
- We read the shops' own pages, slowly. About once a day per record, one request at a time per shop, with seconds in between, honouring every shop's robots.txt, with a user agent that says who we are. The big marketplaces (bol.com, Amazon) are only ever read through their official APIs.
- Prices are landed prices. The item plus the shipping the shop publishes for your country. Where a shop doesn't publish it, we say "shipping at checkout" rather than guess.
- Shops are ordered by what you'd pay. Never by what they pay us. A shop without any arrangement with us is listed all the same, and wins when it's cheapest.
- A deal is measured, not claimed. Every price we see is kept, with its time. A record is marked a deal only after two weeks of history, and only when it's at least 15% under its usual price of the last three months, or the lowest we've seen in that time.
- The receipt only names shops that have the record. A shop we searched that didn't have it isn't on it. Shops we can't read yet are folded away underneath as plain searches.
The money
Some shop links are affiliate links: if you buy after clicking one, the shop pays us a small commission, and you pay the same. It never changes which shops we show, which deal we show, or the order. The links of shops that pay nothing look and behave exactly like the others. That's the whole arrangement, and it's also what Dutch advertising rules ask us to tell you.
The bins
- Staff picks: the best records of 2024, 2025 and 2026 according to Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Quietus, The Wire, Bandcamp Daily, Resident Advisor and Crack Magazine; the hype stickers quote them. Every record, with prices.
- Festivals: one cardboard divider per festival, and behind it the latest album of every act on the bill. The festivals in the bin.
- Your crate: type a Last.fm username and the crate fills with that listener's all-time top albums, most played first. We fetch them from Last.fm when asked and keep them for a few hours so the crate loads fast; nothing is stored beyond that, and those crates are kept out of search engines.
Privacy
No accounts, no cookies, no advertising trackers. Visits are counted with Umami on a server of my own, which counts pages and events (a record lifted, a receipt opened) and never a person. Your country is read from the connection to pick a shipping region, and that's all it's used for.
Credits
- The flip was done first by cratedigger.js by risq (2016, MIT): a 3D crate of records in Three.js. Ours is written from scratch, but that's the reference that said it could be done.
- Built with three.js and React Three Fiber. The crate's springs are our own.
- Covers, tracklists and the 30-second previews come from Deezer. Vinyl barcodes from Discogs and MusicBrainz; back-cover scans from the Cover Art Archive and Discogs contributors. Listening histories from Last.fm.
- Type: Archivo by Omnibus-Type and Courier Prime by Alan Dague-Greene.
- The records belong to the artists and labels who made them. If you're a shop, a label or an artist and want something changed, write to me through ericsmilde.com.