Elton John: Professional Record Collector

Elton John surrounded by his record collection at home in Windsor, England, mid 1970s

Before he was a global superstar, Elton John was a serious record nerd.

He regularly visited Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, stopping in every week to grab new releases and hunt for imports. Record stores were how he discovered music. Studying liner notes, learning musicians’ names, and keeping up with everything happening in real time. Back then, there was no internet, so I was on a true scavenger hunt to collect everything.

By the late ’80s, Elton had built one of the largest private record collections in the world, containing tens of thousands of records and singles dating back to the late 1950s.

In 1991, after getting sober, he made the difficult decision to sell the entire collection to help fund the Elton John AIDS Foundation, reportedly for about $250,000. He later admitted he regretted letting it go.

Elton wasn’t done discovering new music, however. Like many listeners in the ’90s, he shifted toward collecting CDs as the industry moved away from vinyl.

But years later, vinyl pulled him back in. After rediscovering record shops, Elton began rebuilding his collection from scratch. Today, he owns around 7,000 records, buying new releases every week and hunting down albums he once let go decades earlier, proving that for true music fans, the search never really ends.