In a quiet corner of Pinheiros, the 33-year-old record store Eric Discos counts everyone from music collectors to music celebrities among its regulars. It’s not surprising, given the shop’s stock of no less than 80,000 records – all impeccably organised by genre, and spread across the six rooms.

The store specialises in rock albums from the 1960s, but have a good rummage and you’ll find Brazilian music and innumerable other styles – including a room dedicated solely to classical music. The store’s rare gems include albums by The Rutles (R$120), a band dreamed up by Eric Idle and Neil Innes whose Beatles parodies included tracks such as Let it Rot and Tragical History Tour, and which counted the Fab Four themselves among its fans.

The eponymous Eric is one Eric Crauford, a Londoner who moved to São Paulo in 1972 along with a shipment of 27,000 records. Since then, his personal collection has grown to nearly 60,000 records, not counting those on sale in the shop, which Crauford opened in 1979, stocked purely with duplicate records.

Despite the vast number of records he handles, Crauford can name the best-sellers in an instant: The Beatles in general and the Pink Floyd classic, The Dark Side of the Moon, mostly bought by twentysomethings. ‘Records never stopped selling,’ the vinyl veteran tells us. ‘But right now, it’s youngsters in particular who are buying vinyl.’

• Read our round-up of the best São Paulo record shops