The Death of the Record Collection

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.

That's interesting, and weirdly tempting. It would shrink my collection dramatically. But I'm so fond of listening to merely adequate and mediocre records. Not just to find the diamonds in the rough but just, y'know, I can dig on some damned ordinary 70s pop-rock albums, if the tunes are mildly catchy. I have near-complete runs of Billy Joel, Elton John, and Paul McCartney, of which only a small minority would past the "man what a great record" test. This does contribute to the sense of the collection being weighed-down with wince-inducing square crap when I'm browsing in an uninspired mood, but I dunno, it'd feel weird not to have that stuff around to toss on.

The last couple of times I've hung out with an old friend of mine she's done the record-picking out of my collection, and it's been fun because she inevitably picks stuff I haven't put on in ages and it's great not only hearing it again, but hearing it partially through her ears. Feel like I wouldn't get that with a digital collection, though I guess there's no real reason you couldn't, if your folders were all organized and stuff...? My brain tunes out and gives up scrolling through an iPod or iTunes library in a way that it doesn't scanning across a box of records though, for whatever reason. For one thing the latter makes it very natural to grab a few things that you want to come back to and set them aside, which is also cool for managing my own listening. In the last year, for the first time I'm keeping an active "queue" shelf of shit I want to listen to sometime in the near future, which works really well for me.

(again, this is where the store comes in handy. i can listen to not-great or even great stuff all day long and i don't have to take it home with me...)

i've been listening to great country records all week. i don't collect country, but i do enjoy it. out of 200+ records i bought i'm keeping...three? i think.

https://scontent-lga3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xat1/v/t1.0-9/12247110_10154335164612137_3775956363028149473_n.jpg?oh=08a8051fed7911e9db97e02d43077d51&oe=56B03D9F

that johnny horton record is amazing in case you've never heard it. rockabilly country from johnny.

LONNIE 'FAP' WILSON

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

― the top man in the language department (誤訳侮辱), Friday, November 13, 2015 9:38 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i was using the phrase affectionately/ironically :)

I like this cover and I don't know who Lee Morgan is and it's $3"

If you dont get waaaaaay more than 3 dollars of pleasure from lee morgan, spmething has gone very wrong

yeah that one's definitely paid for itself already. "the cooker." will look for more of him next time i pop in there.

Hadn't realized I last posted on this thread six years back. Time does fly.

I still very much actively seek out and purchase music; the majority of what I make from freelancing tends to go back to that pursuit -- such has been the case since I started that, really. But my 'collecting' as such goes to the virtual -- thus, my Bandcamp page details what I am adding to on that front:

https://bandcamp.com/NedRaggett

It's not everything I'm listening to or buying, but it is where the majority of ,y purchasing happens.

The other day, someone on Twitter made a comment I thought appropriate: streaming services is the DRM dream of the labels/providers made manifest. If something goes, it's gone, since you paid for access, not ownership. The point about it being cheaper to legally stream can't be handwaved, but the flipside is obvious. Combined with the fact that -- drawing on my own experience with the Lee Jackson tribute project -- Bandcamp gets the money to you pretty damn seamlessly, I feel clear about getting artists something directly upfront versus royalties that may never happen which also allows me to own a copy directly at the fidelity I want/need. That it is not physically there beyond one's hard drive is a bridge I've long crossed, and as memory cheapens further and further and multiple backups become the norm -- a backup drive was left, intentionally, with my parents well to the south of the Bay, then there's a cloud backup via Amazon -- I'm not too fussed.

Meanwhile I'm looking to consolidate what CDs I have left in their original cases into one large rack via a local bookcase business that does very good work, and what collecting I'm doing there is filling in some gaps. I've got two complete runs of labels that released all or most of their work on CD -- Camera Obscura and Strange Attractors Audio House -- and am looking to complete a number of compilation runs where I had some but not all of the releases (Pebbles, Ethiopiques, Back from the Grave, Dream Babes, etc.). Scrounging the CD clearance section at Amoeba takes care of the rest; so much work just ends up there now by default, and it's easy enough to pass everything along once it's ripped.

Beyond that there's a small clutch of vinyl and cassettes I have that mostly consist of either gifts to me from the artists or was directly purchased from them at shows. Ended up selling about half the cassettes I did have recently to Aquarius and got a good rate for them; I only ever played them once to rip them in turn if there wasn't a download already available.

i got 500+ LPs, never gonna get rid of it. even though it's mostly crappy thrift store exotica records. if there is ever some disaster that wipes out digital music i'll be sitting pretty.

in answer to the thread revival question, I have a "sell pile" but in general am less and less interested in selling. I completely gave up putting stuff on eBay years ago, I only sell at shows. Part of this was because I sold a lot of stuff between 1996 and 2005, much of which I regret (and is now much more expensive).

It's funny, for whatever reason I'm cool with a whole corner of my room being taken up with cubic shelves of five hundred records stacked up to my height, but those two dense, forlorn CD binders still sitting, rarely-touched over on the shelf have started driving me nuts. On a major purge right now, towards at least getting it down to just one binder. It's weird cuz I switched so hard to vinyl in the early 2000s that almost everything in here that I might consider ripping to my computer is from the 90s (aka high school), and it's a fine line between embarrassing-but-still-makes-me-happy-to-put-it-on, and just-embarrassing. I can understand why the boomers were so stoked for CDs - a major format shift is a great excuse to just chuck everything and spare yourself the mirror view of an earlier life.

Anyway, the one binder is just about big enough for anything where the actual physical CD has sentimental value (friends' bands, friends' mixes) or anything I really would like handy for, like, road trips or something (???). So, well, I guess my CD collection's not dead, but it's pretty much over.

spotify has made almost all my cd's and records redundant except for like "hounds of love" and YMO

oh and that new MBV album

After the zombie apocalypse destroys the power grid, I'll still be rocking my CDs via a portable CD player and triple A batteries.

u enjoy

yeah fuck paying musicians lmao

at least half of my record collection is stuff i'd like to get rid of. too lazy, though. need to buy lp mailers.

there will always be records i want, that's for sure. CDs too.

I still buy CDs, about 25-30 a year, on average. Every year I think, "this is going to be the last year artists' bother releasing the CD versions of their albums", but every year I'm wrong. I hope to be wrong many years hence forth.

Lately I have space, and a stereo in a living room, and an impulse to start buying music more like I used to. But if record collections have a problem these days, it's partly an existential one: what are they FOR? Every rubric for purchasing things winds up feeling slightly silly. Buying copies of any new music I enjoy feels sensible but also bunkerish and no-fun, like I'm just symbolically backing up my streaming habits in case the internet explodes. (A hard drive would do this much better, and when it comes to supporting new acts it often feels less weird to buy their t-shirts and merch than token vinyl copies.) Picking up things I already care about that aren't accessible online only goes so far. The most tempting thing, weirdly, has been a preservationist approach — collecting from a very specific historical niche I care about, so I'll have a little archive of it when I'm elderly and nobody cares about keeping it around online — but I always wind up deep in Discogs realizing I'm just not a collector type; as soon as something costs twice as much as a record normally would, I'm probably done.

It's strange: I have the *desire* to get things. The cultural habit is still somewhere in there, and I enjoy it, and I feel good about putting money into record stores and small labels. It's just hard to articulate reasoning for this, beyond cultural muscle memory — and the most fun version of it is, for me (i.e., building a miniature vinyl museum of 1984-1996 indie rock for my kids to be confused by when I die), is totally backward-looking and supports a collector-ish ecosystem, not a new-music one. Any time I think about this for more than a few minutes — or spot a 7-inch on sale for $150 — it's hard not to feel like I should just donate anything in my wallet to a food bank and listen to whatever my phone tells me to.

what are they FOR

compensating musicians

seems weird to assume everything will be on the internet forever imo

nabisco!!!!!!

it's why i still buy criterion blu-rays despite subscribing to the criterion channel -- i don't assume i'll have constant access to certain films i love, and prefer to not be *allowed* to periodically watch them.

same goes for Spotify of course, i realize someday the other shoe could drop and it'll be gone.

building a miniature vinyl museum of 1984-1996 indie rock for my kids to be confused by when I die

sub "kids" with "nephews" for me, and skew dates and genre a bit, but this hits home

also, yeah, the cloud is ephemeral, I just joined Criterion and bought my first two (Female Trouble and Hedwig)

the whole "on demand" internet/streaming services angle is largely a myth imo - so many things turn out to not actually be available when I want to stream them. The only reliable on demand service is to actually own stuff.

I literally cannot afford to buy more than a couple of records every year

similar to social media in a way -- there are plenty of ppl i'm sure who are relying exclusively on Facebook as the pipeline to others. it's an impossible statistic to track but i wonder how many folks have friends only connected through there, not even knowing their phone number or email address.

oh tons for me, everyone from college except a few (less than 10)

i think that's almost exclusively the case for me w/college and high school folks

Every rubric for purchasing things winds up feeling slightly silly.

Sound quality. It's not even a question for me. Streaming audio (in the way I'm able to stream) sounds crappy, CDs sound great.