| LATEST NEWS: How poor are ALDI’s April 2026 vinyl special buys? |
This weekend’s ALDI special buys (kicking off Saturday 14 December 2024) once again include a stack of vinyl records, and I’ve done the digging so you don’t waste your money. Here’s what you need to know:
- The discs are $17.99 each, which is a $2 drop on the price ALDI was charging back in August. That’s a tad surprising, given that even at the higher price and with questionable quality they appeared to sell out quickly.
- Of the 10 discs on sale, 8 are once again bootlegs of radio broadcasts which are legal to market in European countries because of unusual copyright laws. These aren’t strictly illegal, but the artists featured won’t be seeing any money from them.
- Half the discs have the generic title Greatest Hits Live and modern photography of the acts, even though many were recorded early on in the careers of the artists.
- Weirdly, ALDI has classified these as “tech gadgets” in its online catalogue. Yeah but nah.
- As often happens, ALDI is also selling a record player to lure casual listeners. This time around, it’s a return of the $69.99 Retro Turntable Briefcase, which was also on sale at Christmas last year. The only difference is the colours: this year you can choose cream, black or sage.
Here’s the lowdown on all the inclusions in the sale. In previous years, ALDI Australia has sold vinyl discs that have already appeared in Europe, so they’ve been fairly straightforward to track down. But this time around, 6 of the discs appear to be newly-packaged versions of previously bootlegged radio material, so we have to dig a little deeper – and we won’t know for sure with some until they go on sale.
David Bowie, Greatest Hits Of The 70s Live. This would appear to be the same track listing as an earlier bootleg, combining live tracks from 1974 and 1978 with a few numbers sourced from TV performances.
Madonna, Greatest Hits Live. There’s a fair bit of bootleg Madge around, but this one appears to be a repackaging of this track listing, combining tracks from a 1990 show from Dallas and a 1993 Japanese TV broadcast.
Tom Petty, Greatest Hits Live. This looks like a 1986 concert recording from Colorado.
R.E.M, Live 1991, Aerosmith, Greatest Hits Live, Pearl Jam, Greatest Hits Live. All these bands have been heavily bootlegged and seen multiple radio broadcasts, and I’m not confident which particular gigs got chosen here. Reverse image searches suggest they’re newly-packaged, so we’ll just have to wait and see.
Fleetwood Mac, Greatest Hits Live and Nirvana, Smells Like Live Spirit. It’s going to be a surprise when these two discs don’t show up in an ALDI sale: both were in the August 2024 and Christmas 2023 batches. The Fleetwood Mac disc has a deeply deceptive cover, given that several tracks predate the classic Buckingham/Nicks/McVie version of the band. The Nirvana disc mixes 1991 US performances broadcast on radio with some 1993 recordings from Brazil shown on MTV. Both are on frequent ALDI collaborator label Khemco.
Elvis, The Christmas Album and Rockin’ Christmas. These are also repeats from last year’s ALDI Christmas sale. And just like that sale, they’re the only genuine non-live recordings in the batch. Clearly licensing stuff from the 1950s is cheaper.
Bottom line? As ever, these are aimed at casual buyers, and those buyers may well be disappointed. Vinyl records at ALDI remain very much a case of you get what you pay for.
For more ALDI deep dives, check out how ALDI Holidays stack up and where ALDI has its most remote Australian stores.
Leave a Reply