The Death of the Record Collection

Love records but too many cheeky £1 charmers that have been smoking behind the bikesheds for the last 10-15 years are now lording it up silly prices, those lads might just have to find themselves a new home

Have sold off hundreds of records at local record markets, once a year past four years, it's been good, feel like I have a nice and trimmed collection.

When I started collecting I made it a point to not listen to mp3s, I know the two are not mutually exclusive but for some reason I wanted to try using only physical media. Which I've now done for quite a few years. Then last week I bought a chromecast audio and hooked it to my stereo with spotify connect - and now I feel like that's maybe the way I prefer playing music on my stereo. I'll probably have to give it at least a year before I know how I like it... But not entirely sure I enjoy the needle drop enough to not just spotify everything.

I hate spotify so, not an issue!

Hehe, too easyhttps://www.hifiklubben.dk/

Lol did not mean to cp that link stupid ipad

Record collectors of ilm: how often do you consider selling all your records?

15 years ago i moved from up north to down south.
at the time i decided to get rid of some of my unloved vinyl.
worst mistake ever.
yes, most of it i have been able to replace on cd, but there are certain things, that i still wake up in the middle of night while screaming 'WHY!' (eg. Drinking Gasoline 2*12 by Cabaret Voltaire, Seven Songs by 23 Skidoo).
i have never ever got rid of anything, vinyl or cd, since. despite the fact i now use a NAS drive/sonos.
i don't need the money or space anymore, so fuck it.
even if the archive is worthless i care not, i am like gollum and his ring, its precious, and that's the way it is.

I have sold records in the past and regretted it almost every time. Even when I got stupid money for it, I later wished I had it. If you desperately need the money for food or shelter, then do what you have to do. Otherwise, if you're like me, you'll regret getting rid of them.

the fracturing of the streaming services market - and possibly its eventual collapse - should be reason enough for people not to liquidate their collections unless they absolutely have to or want to for some good reason...

^^^

this idea that all music will be available from some online service is sorta silly

"in perpetuity" should've been in there somewhere

another example : it took me 15 years to find a kind soul to help me replace my CHAKK album/extra ltd 12" groove given the album has never had a reissue.
bottom line : never ever ever get rid of vinyl/cds.
yeah yeah re space, yeah yeah re convenience, yeah yeah re old fucker.
but i would rather be wrong, very very wrong, as opposed to never being able to play my CHAKK album again.

Great inputs! I guess even if I stop playing them as much as I used to, they still look great and improve room acoustics. And I prob don't want to regret letting go of any of the rare/sentimental ones...

hear my cry niels.

even with your CA amp, (the diss in that hi-fi thread made my eyebrows rise a lot), your currently unloved music still has a future ..

getting rid of music you don't want any more - go for it. I just donated about 100 CDs that aren't valuable and I know I'll never listen to again in order to create some space. Dumping or not buying music you like just because it's available on Spotify doesn't make much sense though. And that last sentence describes pretty much everyone I know...

"I've collected for abt seven-eight years and have enjoyed it, learned a lot from it, but feel a bit like maybe letting it go now. Not sure I wanna keep spending the money"

as someone with a store, i'm kinda waiting for the avalanche of very heavy almost new "vinyl is back" collections to start coming through the door. i can't give you 30 dollars for that RSD release though. i know, i know, that's what you paid for it.

not speaking about niels specifically. just feel like eventually a lot of people will find spotify more soothing and less of a money drain.

I do have that thought of selling it all sometimes, when i think about the ridiculousness of having all of these records. I guess it's not that many but I've been buying them since the late 80s and I keep thinking that I should just do everything digitally and get some cash for stuff that is now ridiculously overpriced. Then some Sunday morning I pull out something I hadn't heard in awhile and that feeling subsides.

I do purge stuff once a year with little-to-no regret, as I get lots of credit at a local store. I don't buy as much new stuff nowadays so I can make that credit last a long time and it feels like a self-sustaining hobby.

Yeah,I'm in purge mode as I can sell stuff I played loads but won't play again, and that pays for 'new' things.

(not always brand new, mostly old but unheard)

Its on discogs, not priced cheap to shift if I sort-of want to keep it.

dont do it Mark G !

you will regret it ..

even those birdland 7" ..

it's hard to know

i've purged shit that i later regretted a ton, a few that i even re-purchased years later

plenty of others that i'm glad are gone and that felt like a burden to see on my shelf

Same here macos. If I'm thinking of getting rid of something, I usually think about "How easy/hard would it be to reacquire this if I change my mind?"

i sell 100s of my LPs a year and probably only regret two or three sales ever. it's nice not having stuff.

If I ask myself how hard it would be to replace, I figure I shouldn't be selling it. But I'm resigned to having too much stuff.

mark e, its funny there are a few things I sold that I should 'regret' but I don't really. Two spring to mind, the first orange juice and undertones, but they all still exist out there..

well we live in an age where if you really want to hear something, it is impossibly easy to find it again

with some important exceptions, of course, like if you collect 78 rpm records from central asia

Even then, eventually..

Nothing wrong with rotating records, doesnt have to be static

A lot of stuff is hard to get again though, especially with prices going through roof for many things

if you collect 78 rpm records from central asia that is indeed the sort of thing we are interested in and by & large sharity is over. i've been buying again cos i can't find OOP stuff to DL anywhere online
i think people got tired of sharity not cos of the fear of being busted (bin to the year 3000) but cos of the neverending slew of stuff which could /would need sharing maintaining a blogspot will elucidate its own pointlessness and the ephemerality of existence (partic when predicated on hey here's a cool ltd ed dictaphone cassette from 1984 featuring takehisa kosugi's mum doing the hoovering)

well we live in an age where if you really want to hear something, it is impossibly easy to find it again

A tiny fraction of the last hundred years' recorded music can be found on the internet.

<i>ephemerality</i>

is a positive!

xpost yes, but finding a copy is quite easy.

just feel like eventually a lot of people will find spotify more soothing and less of a money drain.

or they owning a physical product but start realising that used CDs are cheap and plentiful and kinda wacky and retro and you can get lots of titles that you can't find easily on vinyl and they're a little more resilient than LPs and all that shit and the whole cycle starts all over again

or they *like* owning

scott: are you afraid of going out of business if vinyl revival loses momentum or is your store more based around lifetime collectors?

i don't know if anything to this effect has been said yet, but, as a "millennial", my "record collection" is digital. i'm an album guy, too.
i hate physical copies of music, and i am very anti-vinyl (anti-surface noise unless i'm looking for something kitschy). i own a bit of vinyl though.

my record collection is made of a collection of 2500 digital albums with perfect id3 tags, and "album art".
i have it backed-up three times, and i plan to leave it to my niece in the event of my death.

"scott: are you afraid of going out of business if vinyl revival loses momentum or is your store more based around lifetime collectors?"

no, i'm not afraid. i just do what i do. it's a niche. people come to me. not a lot of people, but people. i know how to sell records. less young people though than like 3 or 4 or 5 years ago. that has been noticeable. definitely some level of fad behavior for awhile. but out of any fad there will always be a small amount of people who get hooked.

i like and sell old records though. i never cared about the rsd/new 180 gram/etc stuff. people come to me for old stuff.

Periodic purging appeals to me because it requires honesty about the personal value of a recording and make you a curator as opposed to an accumulator. Sure, occasionally you might change your mind but that's OK. A refined collection also makes it easier to pick something at random and really enjoy it (though I get that it's fun to be surprised when crate digging in your own stuff).

of course, now 12" electronic records from 2001 are "old"...

I get your point though. The appeal of $25, 180g represses of stuff (maybe OK sounding, maybe shit) from the 70s escapes me.

also: even though i hate vinyl, i'd still shop at mr. seward's place anyway, were it anywhere near me, just because :D

nothing beats having a store if you feel like purging. sometimes i feel like that's half the reason i have a store. cuz i'm really good at accumulating stuff. feels good to let it go sometimes.

i just bought some good DVDs. i still like DVDs and CDs. i sell them pretty good. there are so few places to buy them now! some people don't have netflix.

i wonder if this has been said:
even though i hate physical copies of music, film, etc. i will always buy them, once in a while, as long as they're produced - they're just cool to have. it's a pain in the ass to digitize everything, though.
i just prefer soft media, and it seems more sustainable. hard copies seem like a waste of resources and time. but, as long as they're still produced, i'll still buy them sometimes - they're kind of neat to see and hold.

xp scott that makes sense... old records rule!

well we live in an age where if you really want to hear something, it is impossibly easy to find it again

A tiny fraction of the last hundred years' recorded music can be found on the internet.

― let no-one live rent free in your butt (sic), Friday, November 13, 2015 1:27 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that is very true. you'd be surprised what you can find on torrent sites, however, and perhaps i'm just being snobby and presumptuous in assuming that the sort of stuff most people here are looking for would be the kind of thing that wouldn't be all that hard to find. in other words, the majority of recorded music is not digitized, but the vast majority of music that the vast majority of people are looking for /has/ been digitized and is not hard to find. i would say that i have a lot of friends who are 'music snobs,' and with the exception of my friends who collect 78s, i'd say that the number of mentions per year of music that is actually /hard to find/ can probably be counted on one hand.

i assume we're talking about OOP records. i wouldn't torrent something that's in print; i'd just buy it again in one format or another. but i don't have much trouble torrenting a record that no record label has any interest in monetizing.

to be honest, the presence of torrent sites has allowed me to clear out a significant chunk of my LPs. (of course, i could just transfer them myself, but that would require much nicer equipment not to mention a huge amount of time.) and i really need the space.

'music snobs' = people who listen to pop music that didn't chart

This is an interesting thread, and not just for the early, important work on the growing crisis of CD binder vulnerability. I have a love/hate relationship with my vinyl collection (515 albums), which I started in high school in the late 90s, working from a handful of my parents' things and just grabbing stuff along the way. There are definitely waves of acquisition and periodic purging - usually when I'm about to move and I try to be honest with myself about what I've meant to listen to and like, and what I actually have. There are very, very few things I've ever purged that I've ever missed in the slightest.

But more generally the 'hate' side of love/hate has to do with the weight and space of the things, and more importantly the vague sense, as I scan across looking for something to listen to, that everything is over-familiar. Naturally with a long-accumulated collection, new additions are in a slim minority versus things you've had forever, and I can start to sort of hate myself by way of the really square-seeming sides of the collection, and marvel at how little I have that was released since I turned 25 or 26. That certainly reflects the easy availability of music online, and the ease of checking something out and determining thoroughly that I don't want to own it, versus being able to conveniently check out a track or two in the early 2000s. But that's how it goes, and the thing is that the old musty parts of the collection also feel like old friends and it's comforting to know they're there, and to pull them out and put them on once in a real blue moon. There's often the temptation to just say fuck it and purge anything I haven't felt any desire to put on in the last, oh, two years... but the thing is if I make myself a little queue of such records and make myself listen to them, they usually end up becoming keepers - "Oh, this is pretty good! I should listen to this more!" This is something I find I can do with a record collection that just wouldn't happen with streaming. I really relate to dog latin's post way upthread, about the "blank screen" problem of being told you can now listen to anything you want to pick out. I think it'd be easy for my listening to end up being less varied.

One thing that's great about a record collection that the disposability of digital files makes it hard for me to see happening there: the sort of tree-ring aspect of my own listening life written across the music I've chosen to acquire. Oh, there's where I got into indie rock in college, there's that three-month period when I discovered Hall & Oates and got all their albums. Recently I've been checking out jazz in a very impulse-buy "I like this cover and I don't know who Lee Morgan is and it's $3" approach, aided by a really good store opening up across the street from me. It locks together with my need right now for music I can put on while trying to get serious reading done, so I'm pretty sure in ten years these records will feel of a piece with this time in my life.

So before this just turns into a long "aesthetic pleasures of vinyl" type post, I guess what I'm trying to say is that my record collection's not dying at all - actually, it's going into another one of these tree-ring growth spurts after a long period of excessive Spotifying and not having a record store on my regular walking circuit. Honestly, my biggest problem right now is that the section Pe-Sl is on the bottom left shelf, up against the wall and sort of awkwardly related to the bedside lamp so I'm less likely to browse through there. Not sure if "The Death of Pearl Jam through The Slits" has the same ring to it though.

i'm slowly working my way toward a collection - this is what i'm hoping for anyway - where no matter what record i take off the shelf i can look at it and say: man, what a great record. this means i am keeping most of my jazz and getting rid of a lot of other stuff.

basically i get rid of a lot of the albums i kept for one song or whatever. and the stuff i look at and go uhhhhh...?????...guess i'll have to play this to figure out why i kept it...

i'm looking for a lack of confusion and some unity. no matter what i pick to play it will be something really good. i don't feel the need to be an archivist or librarian anymore. i'm not keeping stuff for "future research" or whatever. although i would still love to do a book on the best dollar bin records.