Bing Crosby Merry Christmas on Vinyl: Which Pressing You Have and What It's Worth (2026)

Nearly everyone who searches for bing crosby merry christmas vinyl worth is holding one of four things: a heavy album book of shellac 78s, a small 10-inch LP, a 12-inch Decca LP with a black or rainbow-striped label, or a 12-inch MCA LP. Only the first of those is the original release. Merry Christmas began life in 1945 as Decca A-403, an album set of five 78 rpm shellac discs, and it is that set — not any LP — that collectors mean when they say "first edition". The 12-inch LP everybody recognises, Decca DL-8128, did not exist until 1955, a full decade later.

The value verdict is equally blunt. This record sold in staggering quantities for decades, which means a used Decca or MCA copy with ring wear and a scuffed surface is a bargain-bin record — dealers routinely file it in the cheap bins alongside Mantovani and Herb Alpert. What does carry a premium is condition and scarcity at the edges: an intact, unbroken 1945 or 1947 78 album, a crisp black-label 1955 pressing, or a sealed modern colour-vinyl pressing. If you inherited a stack of Crosby records, our guide to what to do when you've inherited a vinyl record collection explains how to triage a box before you price anything.

According to Wikipedia's entry on Merry Christmas (Bing Crosby album), the album was first released in 1945 as the 78 rpm set Decca A-403: ten songs spread across five discs, all of them previously issued singles. These are shellac, not vinyl — a point the press gets wrong constantly when it writes about the bing crosby merry christmas vinyl 1945 release. Shellac is brittle, heavy and noisy, and it shatters if dropped, which is why complete, uncracked 1945 sets are far scarcer than the production numbers suggest.

In 1947 Decca issued a revised set, A-550, on four discs. "Danny Boy" and "Let's Start the New Year Right" were dropped, and newly recorded 1947 versions of "White Christmas" and "Silent Night" were added — the 1942 "White Christmas" master had literally worn out from repressing. That 1942 recording has never appeared on an LP or a 45; every album version you can play on a turntable at 33 or 45 rpm is the 1947 remake.

From there the formats multiply: the 1949 10-inch LP Decca DL-5019 carrying the eight A-550 songs, a 45 rpm box (Decca 9-65, 1950) replaced by the two-EP set ED 547 in 1952, and finally the 12-inch DL-8128 in 1955, which added "Silver Bells", "Mele Kalikimaka", "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" and "Christmas in Killarney" for a twelve-track programme. If the differences between those formats are new to you, our breakdown of 7-inch, 10-inch and 12-inch record sizes is a useful companion.

Here is the part no other page gives you. The table below is built from the two Discogs masters for this album — the 1945 78 rpm set and the 1955 LP — and lists the versions that matter for identification — every format from the 1945 shellac set onwards, one row per year, country and catalogue number — oldest first, checked 2026-10-12. It shows year, country, label and catalogue number, format and runout details so you can match the record physically in your hands rather than guessing from a jacket photo.

Read it from the top. The earliest rows are the shellac 78 album sets — those are the originals, and nothing further down the table can claim that title. The middle of the table is where most readers land: the 1955 Decca DL-8128 and its 1960s re-channeled sibling DL-78128, the version that sold by the truckload and the version that most people inherit. The lower rows are MCA-era and modern reissues, including the Geffen/UMe mono LP of 30 September 2014 and the colour-vinyl retail exclusives. Find your catalogue number on the label — it is printed at the top or the side of the label face, not on the jacket spine — and the row it sits in tells you roughly when your copy was manufactured. Then confirm the decade with the label-dating key in the next section.

Label design is the fastest dating tool on any American record, and Decca/MCA changed theirs on a schedule you can learn in five minutes. Learning this one key answers the bing crosby merry christmas lp question better than any price guide, because it tells you the manufacturing era regardless of what the jacket looks like (jackets were reused for years, and reissue jackets often reproduce the 1955 artwork exactly).

• Decca script label (78 rpm): the 1945 A-403 discs carry Decca's script label, per the long-running Steve Hoffman Music Forums user guide to the album.
• Decca "Personality" label (78 rpm): the 1947 A-550 discs use the Personality label design, again per that forum guide.
• Decca black label with "Long Play" at top left: US Decca LP labels in this style belong to roughly 1949–1954 — the era of the 10-inch DL-5019.
• Decca black label with silver print: the first pressings of the 12-inch DL-8128 in 1955. Rigid, heavy pressing; the forum guide calls this "THE release to get" among pre-2014 issues.
• Decca colour-band "rainbow" label: arrived around 1960 (per cvinyl.com's Decca label guide) and covers all 1960s copies, mono DL-8128 and re-channeled stereo DL-78128 alike.
• MCA black rainbow: 1973 into late 1977 — Decca's US name was retired in favour of MCA in 1973.
• MCA tan: from late 1977.
• MCA blue rainbow: from 1980.

Two refinements worth knowing: a "7" prefix on the catalogue number (DL-78128) marks the electronically re-channeled stereo edition, and MCA used both MCA 167 (1973) and later MCA 15024. For the general method behind all of this — deadwax codes, rim text, rights-society marks — see our guide on how to date a vinyl record.

Every song on this album was recorded in mono, years before stereo records reached the shops. That did not stop Decca from issuing an electronically re-channeled stereo version in 1963, DL-78128, with the signal split by frequency and drenched in added reverb. It is not stereo in any meaningful sense, and if you are chasing sound quality it is the version to avoid. The mono DL-8128 was deleted in 1968, so from then until the 1980s a buyer walking into a store got fake stereo by default.

The MCA era muddied it further. Early MCA pressings continued the re-channeled stereo mix; dry mono returned on later MCA copies, most consistently on the blue-rainbow label issues from 1980 onward. That means two MCA records with the same catalogue number can sound completely different depending on which label era they come from — exactly the sort of thing a jacket photo on an auction site will never tell you.

The Steve Hoffman forum guide's verdict, offered as an experienced listener's opinion rather than a measurement, is worth repeating: the 1949/1951 10-inch LPs are the worst-sounding issues of this album, and the 1955 black-and-silver DL-8128 is the best-sounding pre-2014 pressing. The Geffen/UMe LP of 30 September 2014 restored dry mono, reproducing the 1955 jacket and black Decca label — making it the obvious choice if you simply want a clean-sounding copy to play every December rather than a collectible.

Let's answer how much is the bing crosby christmas album worth honestly. This is one of the most-pressed albums in American history; across all its issues it spent 39 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's pop albums chart, and Decca and MCA kept it in print for decades. Abundance sets the price, and collectors' own logs show how much of it there is: on Discogs, 8,892 members record owning the 1955 US DL-8128 alone, more than 2,000 each the 1971 Decca and 1973 MCA pressings, and 381 the 1945 A-403 shellac set (checked 12 October 2026). A played 1960s rainbow-label or 1970s MCA copy with a split seam is a dollar-bin record, and no price guide will change that. The exceptions are narrow and specific.

On the 1945 set, be careful with the numbers you read online. AOL/Wealth Gang (Rachel Schneider, 23 November 2024) reported the highest eBay listing for a 1945 Merry Christmas set at $2,089 and described it as worth "a couple thousand dollars" in excellent condition. That is an asking price in a listicle, not a completed sale — and the item in question is shellac, not vinyl. Treat it as a ceiling someone hoped for, not a market value. For realistic expectations on shellac generally, see our guide to how much 78 rpm records are worth, and for the seasonal market as a whole, Christmas vinyl records worth money.

A large share of the confusion around this record comes from the title. In 1986 Universal renamed the album White Christmas for its CD release, and the RIAA 4x Platinum certification is filed under that title — which is why search results, streaming services and press articles flip between the two names as if they were different albums. They are not. The 2014 vinyl reissue reverted to Merry Christmas, restoring the original name. In Europe, Coral COPS 1011 (1970) was also issued as White Christmas, so a European copy with that title on the sleeve may well be the same programme under another banner.

The second layer of confusion is the song versus the album. "White Christmas" the single is a separate, hugely documented release; the album is a compilation of Crosby's seasonal sides. Because the 1942 master wore out, the version on every LP and 45 of this album is the 1947 re-recording — so a seller advertising "the original 1942 White Christmas on LP" is either mistaken or stretching the truth. The only way to own the 1942 performance in its original issued form is on 78.

Practically, this means you should always identify by catalogue number and label, never by title. Two records called White Christmas can be a 1970 European Coral pressing and a 1986 CD-era repackage; two called Merry Christmas can be a 1945 shellac album and a 2014 Geffen LP. The techniques in our vinyl grading guide matter just as much, because on a record this common, condition is the entire pricing argument.

So, are bing crosby vinyl records worth anything in practical selling terms? For the typical inherited copy, the honest answer is: not enough to justify shipping it. A 12-inch LP costs real money to pack and post in North America, and a common rainbow-label or MCA copy will rarely clear that cost after fees. The sensible outcomes for those are keeping it to play, donating it, or including it in a bulk lot sold locally where the buyer absorbs transport.

Three situations do justify effort. First, a complete and unbroken 1945 A-403 or 1947 A-550 78 album — list it with photographs of every disc face, state clearly that it is shellac, and describe cracks, chips and hairlines explicitly, because 78 buyers assume the worst. Second, a genuinely sharp black-label 1955 DL-8128 with a clean jacket and no ring wear; here grading precision earns the premium. Third, anything still sealed, especially the 2019 Walmart white vinyl, which went out of stock at its $17.99 list price and has traded above it since.

Before you list, identify the pressing properly — tools like VinylAI let you scan a barcode or photograph the label and match it against pressing data, so you are not guessing between a 1963 re-channeled stereo copy and a 1955 mono one. Then price from completed sales, not from active asking prices. Our walkthrough on how to sell vinyl records covers platform fees, packing for 78s and when a bulk sale beats individual listings.