The Death of the Record Collection

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.

(I stream a lot at work, but if I love something, I'll buy it so I can really listen to it.)

ppl naturally drift away and move apart from one another so Facebook is basically a life support system for your dead social ties and it would probably be good to pull the plug in many cases but there's a stigma in doing so of course.

just do it, facebook is a blight on society

If the sole point is to compensate musicians, I'm doing better when I buy merch, or add an extra $5 to the choose-your-own-price field on Bandcamp. And I agree that we're likely to be hit with huge shifts in what's available to stream, but if I were trying to preserve my favorite things that way, I should probably be stocking a massive hard drive with all the random curated playlists I listen to. That impermanence is daunting — the services allow you to get attached to such a breadth of stuff that you couldn't really hope to back it all up physically. Is that really the purpose of a collection, something defensive, a kind of Noah's Ark for when the digital flood comes? Picking the records, two by two, that you can save?

It is probably also kinda relevant that I have almost no time at home to sit and listen to music, making vinyl in particular feel very fetishistic and symbolic. My sustained listening happens on a commuter train. I should also admit that I am kind of hoping ILX will convince me that yeah, building an archive of Simple Machines seven-inches is actually very important preservation work, and 22nd-century historians will thank me for it

no time at home to sit and listen to music

I would simply change my life rather than changing my record-buying habits

personally I've just never cottoned to streaming, it just isn't how I like to engage with music. I want to listen to what I want when I want it and often repeatedly and exhaustively and deeply. A fair chunk is commuter listening but there's also listening at home and road trips etc. For me ownership - whether of MP3s or records - enables all that. I maintain a hard drive/cloud storage and regularly cull my LPs/buy new ones (albeit not nearly as many as I did in my cheap-vinyl + no kids heyday). I dunno at this point I don't foresee ever changing until I have to move into an old folks home or whatever.

the thing about breadth is relevant if that's what you're into - but that's definitely *not* what I'm into. I'm not interested in keeping tabs on "what's new" anymore either (there's too much to even try! also huge chunks of it are awful!)

I like taking deep dives into specific things, and when I get into something I just start acquiring what I really like and hold onto it and develop a relationship w it.

I am probably competing with you for that exact kind of vinyl- late 80s early 90s indie pop... maybe you're the person that scooped up that cheap Cat's Miaow 10" I didn't get in time. Good luck getting that Fat Tulips record that has been sitting on the shelf in Hoboken since October- it's mine now!

I also rarely get around to spinning records; indeed "fetishistic and symbolic", I am invested in the hunt and I love the artifact of the ~vintage~ physical representation of that particular genre of music. With newer vinyl it's mostly artists that CommendNYC stock (experimental/ambient/electronic) and it feels meaningful to support them by acquiring their music in the ideal format. There's something artsy about their choice in cover art and material and inclusions, so feels similar to buying screen prints from illustrators I enjoy.

New indie rock on the other hand feels like novelty. The album art and overall look & feel generally brings to mind an ad in a magazine vs. that DIY assembled labor of love you get from early 90s 45s from the likes of Sarah or early Slumberland etc. So often times that kind of stuff feels more like clutter. Plus the music itself is so readily digital. Maybe cause the production is so clean and modern... just an overall aesthetic that associates with digital consumption in my head?

I think it's fine to have the hobby and to acquire meaningful artifacts as long as you have a real connection to it. It's harder to feel that way about mass produced new stock flooding Urban Outfitters bins.

xposts

"But if record collections have a problem these days, it's partly an existential one: what are they FOR?"

I still avidly buy physical, so for me it comes down to:

1) Surround sound on SACD or Blu-ray. I don't understand why there was little uptake of surround sound among download providers. Even when a label offers surround sound on the physical release, generally the only download format they offer is two-channel stereo.

2) Liner notes. Some labels are now offering their booklets for download (even without purchasing the audio files), but not all. There are a lot of insightful commentaries on musical pieces that are found only on the actual printed paper, nowhere on the internet.

3) The artwork, of course, for which I buy the vinyl release and I torrent FLACs to get the actual music. The vinyl serves for interior decoration, I line my hallway with vinyl releases, there are some easy DIY projects on the web for doing this.

Points one and two are mainly relevant for classical music listeners. Point one will also apply to rock obsessives – it’s great to have certain King Crimson and Pink Floyd releases in surround sound.

i've been much more judicious in what i acquire on vinyl, probably bc over time i've found better resources for determining if a particular pressing or reissue is worth my time. for example the Stereolab reissues in the past year have been incredible, as are the Blue Note Tone Poet/Blue Note 80 reissues. and uh sorry vv much in character here but the U2 reissues/recent releases on vinyl have been actually exceptionally good.

On the flipside there are some bands I enjoy like Pearl Jam who for all their pro vinyl rhapsodizing don’t have especially good pressings

Françoise Hardy’s reissues on light in the attic were fantastic as are her reissues on Parlophone

Anyway I do think it is often a losing and endless game trying to keep up with acquiring vinyl due to budget and space constraints

Evan, yes, that is exactly why collecting that era makes intuitive sense to me — the whole vibe and aesthetic revolved around these sort of scrappy, cherished, labor-of-love documents. There is definitely Cat's Miaow vinyl in my discogs wantlist, but this is what I mean about now being a good collector: I can't justify the price when there are CD comps and, you know, actual needs in the world. (I'm not kidding about pretty much constantly thinking "I could buy this record or give $20 to a food bank.") The people paying $100 for the "Popkiss" 7-inch are in a league I will never be able to compete with.

I still do believe well mastered vinyl on a good turntable is the best.

though, as omar says, there's a lot of shit vinyl being pressed now.

still, the new Purple Mountains for example sounds amazing

all this said, I've recently subscribed to Qobuz, which does 24-bit streaming, from Chromecast audio into a DAC and, dang, it's pretty damn close to really good vinyl, very very very close to the point I wonder if I could tell

Spotify I use walking around on headphones or in the car, but the sound quality is a joke esp after I heard Tidal and (now) Qobuz