Record stores in Johannesburg

Vinyl hunting in Johannesburg, Gauteng? There are 7 record shops mapped here. That's 7 record shops mapped around Johannesburg. Every shop grades and prices differently, so the same record can be a bargain in one and a splurge in another — dig everywhere. The new-arrivals bin is always the first stop — that's where the good stuff lands before anyone else sees it.

This guide covers every record store we could verify in and around Johannesburg (within about 40 km), built from OpenStreetMap's community-maintained data. Names you'll run into include Mr Vinyl and Dakota Music, plus Recordmad. If a record shop's missing from Johannesburg's list, it probably just hasn't been mapped yet.

The Johannesburg record lineup

7 mapped within about 40 km:

What the map tells us about record stores in Johannesburg

2 of the 7 list their opening hours on the map, which is genuinely useful — record shops keep shop hours, so the listed times are usually reliable.

3 have websites listed. Worth a look for new-arrival posts and want-list services.

Most of the record stores in Johannesburg list a phone number. Useful for asking what's just come into the used bins.

The Johannesburg record crawl

The efficient Johannesburg record crawl strings these together: Mr Vinyl on 44 Stanley Avenue, Dakota Music, Recordmad on 59 4th Avenue, Vinyl Junkie, Phase 2, Musica, and Super CD — 7 stops, one logical order.

Record digging tips for Johannesburg

A few things worth knowing before you work through Johannesburg's record stores:

• Learn your labels at Mr Vinyl. Certain labels mean certain quality. A quick education in the labels of your favourite genres pays off fast.
• Learn the grading at Dakota Music. Mint, near mint, very good — and check whether the grade is visual or play-graded. A visual VG+ can play like an EX.
• Buy the weird stuff. Private pressings, local bands, oddball compilations — the strange records are the ones that appreciate.
• The listening station is the test. If a record looks questionable, play the loud passages. That's where surface noise shows up.

Good to know

We searched about 40 km around Johannesburg — that covers the town itself plus the surrounding communities you'd reasonably drive to. Listings come from OpenStreetMap, mapped by local volunteers, so a brand-new record store in Johannesburg can take a while to appear. If you spot one of the 7 that's closed, or a great record store we missed, the fix is to update the map itself — that's where this guide reads from.

We don't list prices or stock — both change by the day. What we list is the where: real shops, verified by real mappers.

If you run one of the 7 listed here and something's wrong — a closure, a move, new hours — the fix is the same: update the shop on OpenStreetMap and the correction flows through to this page on the next daily refresh.