Daft Punk, Kendrick Lamar, and Jack White Crack the Top 10 Most Collected Releases on Discogs

Recent records by Daft Punk, Kendrick Lamar, and Jack White are among the most popular releases of all time.

Story by: Annie Zaleski

If you look at the most-collected releases on Discogs, you’ll find some familiar LPs that are probably in your collection: classic rock staples such as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours and Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon or ’80s blockbusters like Prince’s Purple Rain and Michael Jackson’s Thriller.

This list makes a lot of sense from both a commercial and pop culture perspective — Thriller remains the best-selling album of all time and both The Dark Side of the Moon and Rumours are within the top 10 in sales. However, the most-collected releases list also includes a trio of LPs released within the last decade: Daft Punk’s fourth studio full-length, 2013’s Random Access Memories; Kendrick Lamar’s sophomore effort and major-label debut, 2012’s Good Kid, M.A.A.d City; and Jack White’s 2014 solo album Lazaretto.

All three albums certainly benefited from good timing, mainly the start of the vinyl resurgence and a renaissance of collecting culture. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), between 2012 and 2015, vinyl sales rose from 6.9 million to 13.7 million units. However, these three LPs, while certainly critically and commercially acclaimed, aren’t necessarily the signature releases from these artists. For example, White’s first album, Blunderbuss, is his only gold-certified solo effort, while Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly made the top 20 of Rolling Stone‘s 2020 version of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

So how did these three records crack the top 10 most-collected releases of all time?

About the data: The ranking of most-collected releases is determined by the number of releases cataloged in Discogs users’ Collections. The Collection tool allows you to easily keep track of the music you own, as well as its value.

Random Access Memories

Daft Punk

2013

Electronic, Pop

Vinyl

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1. Daft Punk ‎– Random Access Memories (2013)

2 × Vinyl, LP, Album, 180 Gram

Random Access Memories, which was released on May 17, 2013, is the exception. Daft Punk’s best-selling album was a Discogs success from the start: It was the most collected LP of 2013, besting Boards of Canada’s Tomorrow’s Harvest by nearly 500 copies, and remains wildly popular. By now, Random Access Memories is in more than 56,000 Discogs Collections, more than twice as many as any other Daft Punk album.

Call this dominance a combination of sales, awards, and cred. For starters, the album has widespread appeal because it features both legends (Giorgio Moroder, Nile Rodgers, Nathan East) and modern icons (Panda Bear, Julian Casablancas, Pharrell Williams). The LP also won three Grammys (Album of the Year, Best Dance/Electronica Album, and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical), while the quadruple-platinum single “Get Lucky” also won two Grammys (Record of the Year, Best Pop Duo/Group Performance). And with its warm dance floor grooves and influences from 1970s disco and funk, Random Access Memories sounds tailor-made for vinyl — a retro-sounding platter with modern cool.

Good Kid, M.A.A.d City

Kendrick Lamar

2012

Hip Hop

Vinyl, Album

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2. Kendrick Lamar ‎– Good Kid, M.A.A.d City (2012)

2 × Vinyl, LP, Album, Deluxe Edition

Kendrick Lamar, on the other hand, had a slower and steadier ascent to collection dominance. In November 2012, the month after Good Kid, M.A.A.d City‘s release, he was added to 135 Collections on Discogs. Through September 2015, he only cracked 1,000 adds in a month once. However, in October of that year — months after the release of To Pimp a Butterfly — his Collection adds lept from 760 to 1,350 and has only increased since. His five Grammys and incredible performance at the ceremony pushed him to 2,500 adds in March 2016; in January 2017, months before the release of Damn, his adds soared to over 5,300.

Another major jump occurred in December 2020, when he nearly cracked the 10,000-add threshold. That leap is purely due to Good Kid, M.A.A.d City, which sold 117,000 copies last year, making it the best-selling rap vinyl album of 2020 and tenth in the overall, all-genre vinyl sales list. In fact, the album re-entered the top 10 of Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart in early 2021 and reached No. 1 on the magazine’s Vinyl Albums chart on March 6, 2021 — nearly a decade after its release. Chalk it up to availability — “Good Kid has sold particularly well in recent weeks on vinyl at independent record stores, as well as Target and Walmart, thanks to sale pricing and holiday promotions,” Billboard noted in early 2021 — and financial smarts. The original LP’s median Discogs sale price remains around $24 USD.

Lazaretto

Jack White

2014

Alternative Rock, Blues Rock, Country Rock

Vinyl, LP, Album, Etched, Ultra LP

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6. Jack White ‎– Lazaretto (2014)

Vinyl, LP, Album, Etched, Ultra LP

And then there’s Jack White’s Lazaretto. The LP’s June 10, 2014, release precipitated a spike in his Collection adds to 8,300 that month, up nearly 2,000 adds from May 2014. It was also the most-collected release of 2014. Today, Lazaretto is in over 32,000 Discogs user collections, behind only The White Stripes’ Elephant in White’s catalog.

That stat is telling: Because he’s long embraced vinyl formats, he has been a major driver of the vinyl renaissance. In fact, his 25 most-collected releases are all in more than 10,000 Collections. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that the most-collected version of Lazaretto is also the first pressing that’s a particularly special release: It has hidden tracks, locked grooves, a song with two different intros (“Just One Drink”), and a “hand-etched hologram by Tristan Duke of Infinity Light Science, the first of its kind on a vinyl record.” Lazaretto has unique extras that make it a collector’s dream. For a true original like White, nothing less will suffice.

Editor’s note: Article originally published in 2021. Last updated in 2022.