The Death of the Record Collection

^^I agree with that, I almost never buy LPs I haven't already heard but I'll pick up any bargain bin CD if it piques my interest

mainly i buy disposable trash house 12”s, the occasional jazz record (wynton kelly my current obsession) and am slowly getting every classic reggae and lovers rock single i can think of.

and i play them!! :)

if anyone hates their record collection and wants to sell, please let me know. My records are all I have. No friends, no hope, just records. So let me know if you want to sell me some. I've got a massive wantlist and it seems like these records are just making you all feel so bad.

I bought vinyl in 2004-2009 period, then stopped due to a couple of factors, in favor of CDs, then downloading, then streaming. Right before my best friend died a couple years ago, he got into vinyl and then left me his turntable and records. I got so into vinyl this time around I bought new speakers and a new (used) amplifier and have my eye on a couple of other upgrades. I buy on average 5 or so mostly used records every week. Sound quality is the biggest issue for me - I would have to spend orders of magnitude more to get a streaming or CD setup to sound as good and really am enjoying vinyl this time around.

I'm not super picky on pressings, etc., but definitely have a preference for used vinyl for anything that was recorded in analogue.

What's all this talk of binning? No charity shops in a lot of places?

Good thing about having a collection is seeing how incomplete it is, so an extra reminder to buy more. Perhaps a better reminder than my shopping lists.

Streaming isn't much of an option for me, we've had at least 5 people try to fix the internet connection before the weather keeps obliterating it. This is happing nearly every year for a long time, but this is the worst time yet.

Another person will try next week, fingers crossed!

I'm kinda fascinated by everyone's personal genre splits between formats. The only reason I started buying vinyl was that when I first worked in a record store, in 99, the $2 bin was consistently full of new-wave records — so at least a third of what I have is, like, scuffed-up Vapors and XTC and B-52s albums. Another good chunk is early-00s electro 12-inches, because I lived near a shop that focused on them. It's really only now that streaming exists (and now that I never get to browse an actual record store) that I'll want to purchase an album and think of vinyl first — maybe stupidly, in the case of older stuff, because damn are used CDs cheap as dirt. (P.S. It is interesting coming back to ILX after some absence and seeing how life has changed and I suspect that eventually we are all going to owe an apology to Gale Delongchamps.)

the best parts of my collection are representative of certain stores that i used to live near. in 2006 i was in chicago for a bit and lived around the corner from a place with excellent italo and kraftwerk/ymo/telex kind of stuff. in dc, where i met my future partner, a record store near her place had excellent, inexpensive gospel (lots of old nashboro stuff). seems like she built up her gospel collection in a crazy 6 month period where that's all we listened to

good to see you btw nabisco (i used to be Z S but i think that was also after your time)

Indeed, hello again Nabisco and hope you're well!

Colonel Poo's posts were slightly echoed in my brain a few weeks back, when I had a sense of just ending up surrounded by 'information' broadly conceived in the end and...that's it. My collection as such fluctuates but is much smaller than it was and I'm happy for that. It will, at least, be something idiosyncratic for someone to ponder at a future date, I suspect.

Like omar, I too subscribe to Criterion but also regularly get their discs -- I pretty much try and pick up a new one from each monthly batch they announce, there's almost always something. I'm much more pitiless about my tv/movie hard copy purchases; nearly all of them exist in binders with me, and they've all held up very nicely. And again, they're there. (I do keep all the Criterion booklets, obviously.)

Right now, I pretty much have been concentrating all my CD purchases on strictly archival material with detailed liner notes -- essentially, research tools, much like my collection of books on music. I have occasional flashes of random completeness -- for instance, I pretty much assiduously dedicated myself for some months to literally buy every last CD I could that Coil put out, along with a number of the shadowy releases since Peter died, partially because their story is now out of the hands of its creators, and there's a real sense of archiving something, somehow. But otherwise, it's pretty much things like "Oh another Bob Stanley comp? Great!," the very occasional hard copy purchase of the work of an old favorite and beyond that -- Bandcamp. Bandcamp all the way.

No, we should be curators of what brings us joy, and eject all else from our lives. Build a library, not a collection, with the caveat that no one else will really care about your library after you're gone.

― Gerald McBoing-Boing

this talk of curation, librarianship, my dad was a librarian, what i'm doing seems to me to bear no relation to it. there's no sense of the public good in what i do, there's no guiding principle, it's a big pile of random shit that, again, will vanish almost instantaneously when i'm gone because nobody else can really be expected to care

i really love my pile of random shit, cloud nothing can do for me what it does, but there's no sense of permanence to it, it just grows organically until like any system it catastrophically fails

nothing i "have" has any value to me except its use value, but i want to reserve the right to decide when that use value is exhausted.

The concept of curation is not as an objective cataloguer but rather making an honest decision about what has value to you or brings you joy. By all means, we should keep things until that "value is exhausted".

Is it a particularly 21st century problem of feeling the need to obtain "everything" by an artist / in a category / of a genre? Because there was a time not long ago when such an idea was more or less impossible. We didn't even know what was missing, or how to find it if the local store/ flea market / etc didn't have it.

Discogs definitely exerts a curation pressure on me as a record buyer

Interesting that when the topic of vinyl comes up, people start posting about turntables and needles. I recall reading somewhere that the vast majority of buyers of vinyl these days don't even own a turntable. I don't. I buy vinyl for the decoration, but I torrent FLACs to actually listen to the music. (And apparently a lot of younger people today buy vinyl for decoration, and then use YouTube to actually listen to the music.)

(Records sound great fwiw.)

Very much about playing the records I own

(Admittedly there was a longish stage when I didn’t own a turntable and was still buying the occasional vinyl release - but I always intended to get a turntable again and when I found one that clicked for me I was suddenly buying a lot more stuff on vinyl)

lol “the decoration” please kill me

do you mean like putting whipped cream and other delights on the wall or

Ugghhhhhhhhhhh


https://www.discogs.com/label/788764-Moonshake

can has been the victim of defamation of character

Good thing I'm not much of an object fetishist, whether it be for records, books or just about anything else – I simply couldn't afford it. Dematerialization (as the French call it) is what made my obsession with music possible in the first place.

Spotify is pure evil.

Makes me very sad when friends I know love music and used to support musicians (or even were musicians) send me a link to an album I should hear, or the new "playlist" they made, an it's to Spotify. For less-well-known musicisns. It's like saying to an artis "Love your music! Thsnk you for your art! Glad I could help ensure you'll never visbly be able to scrape a subsistence-level living together from it. Here's $0.003 cents as a heartfelt token of my appreciation."

So yeah, still collecting. Similar to Ned, it's evolved for me into CDs for archival releases and the occasional new album (shops in my city are all too cool for CDs, vinyl-only, which I don't have room to collect), and digital downloads from Bandcamp for current releases. Roughly 250 or so CDs a rear, and 200+ downloads, maybe 3-5 LPs a year for new albums that mean a lot to me.

I know no one will want any of it when I die--but per the original (prescient) post of this thread, I try to get others to buy music, too, by using my collection to make mixes for Musicophilia. Fairly sure I manage to cause a few hundred dollars in sales a year; but presumably at this point most just go add things to their Spotify "library".

Like most things, in the big picture the end of music collections probably doesn't really mean much what with the end of humanity looming etc. But I'll still go to bat for a music collection as one of the few acquisitive obsessions that can (or used to be able to) benefit people beyond the collector. I'm generally of the impression thst the current youngest generations are ethically and politically superior to the older one (mine being somewhere in the middle), but I am actually sad for them that music has become a largely a borrowed-and-will-disapear-on-a-corporate-whim proposition that can't sustain the artists making it.

Shouldn't have typed that on a phone. Sorry for the typos.

great post, and otm

We didn't even know what was missing, or how to find it if the local store/ flea market / etc didn't have it.

― Gerald McBoing-Boing, Saturday, March 7, 2020 3:52 AM

It's slightly before my time but wasn't mail order what people did before internet? I recall when there was still plenty of music magazines, there would be lists/addresses for lots of metal and goth you'd never see in the shops.

So a lot of you don't seem to have younger friends who'd inherit your collection? I'm hoping I could arrange for friends or like minded people to just come and take whatever they wanted before the rest goes to charity shops.
In horror Wilum Pugmire and Avalon Brantley are super niche writers but their family/friends are or were selling off their book collections. Brantley's music collection too.
http://sesqua.net/pugmire-book-sale.html

I moved across the Atlantic six years ago and sold/"sold" basically everything we owned: furniture, housewares, appliances, obv, but also all books, cds, etc. I had had about 6000 cds I think. I've digital copies of all the music (and most of the books) and I don't intend to replace physical versions of any of them. That's one way to end any collecting urges you may have, if you're looking for an out. I don't have physical collecting urges: I just wanted to hear a lot of music, and buying the physical artifact was the only way. I've never owned any vinyl.

The longest I've ever lived in one place is seven years, and usually it's more like 1-3 years in any given place, so physical collections aren't compatible with how I like to live. I have a few friends who've built vinyl collections but they seem content to live in one place. Mobility and the collecting urge are in tension with one another.

I listen to my records all the time, I have my stereo in the living room and it's kind of open so I just have records playing while I putter around, clean, cook, etc

Yup me too

The longest I've ever lived in one place is seven years, and usually it's more like 1-3 years in any given place, so physical collections aren't compatible with how I like to live. I have a few friends who've built vinyl collections but they seem content to live in one place. Mobility and the collecting urge are in tension with one another.

i have about 1,200 or so, and move every 1-3 years, and for some reason i've never felt it to be too annoying to move them! i guess if i had more like 5-10K it would be more of an undertaking. but i keep a stack of record-sized boxes from ULine that i use every for every move, then break down and tuck away in a closet somewhere. the most annoying part of moving records, for me, is trying to decide whether to take apart the goddamn ikea expedit kallax or hire two hunks and a truck to move it up and down stairs with nothing but pure sexiness and a little bit of nerve

talk shit about buying records for the art all you like, you think i wouldn't be proud to have the cover of glohaven's "travel agency" hanging on my wall?

(i don't spotify, i do discogs, but overall i think discogs is worse... 184 people want to buy that record??? really? peak artificial scarcity)

Is it a particularly 21st century problem of feeling the need to obtain "everything" by an artist / in a category / of a genre? Because there was a time not long ago when such an idea was more or less impossible. We didn't even know what was missing, or how to find it if the local store/ flea market / etc didn't have it.

Essential viewing on this topic from Toronto documentarian Alan Zweig (2000), prior to the internet being a serious factor and the vinyl revival:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkCMSrvOTAo

Yeah, there was mail order (labels had catalogs, you could write to them after reading a review in a zine, etc.); and record store clerks were also a resource, they knew their shit and could place orders for you...

I listen to my records all the time, I have my stereo in the living room and it's kind of open so I just have records playing while I putter around, clean, cook, etc

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Saturday, 7 March 2020 15:42 (one hour ago) link

Yup me too

― Οὖτις, Saturday, 7 March 2020 15:59 (one hour ago) link

^^^Thirded. First thing I do when I get home from work is turn on the amp and preamp.

Same

I've pretty much stopped buying vinyl because pressing inconsistency and fiddliness of replacing cartridges etc. I buy CDs. Probably a couple a week. They're convenient, and now cheap. They sound great on my system - as good as my records. And I can rip them easily for on the go listening.

I will never use online streaming services. As noted above, Spotify is evil. And I like browsing shelves and putting something on. Reading lyric sheets and liner notes - though CD versions of these are sometimes annoyingly tiny...

one thing that is great about record collecting now it's YouTube

really saved me a lot of money, you can always listen to the RARE OOP l@@k private press psych record and learn that, no, Appomattox Rising actually just sounds like shit Moby Grape

very true, but I still have this irrational impulse where I want to buy (some) records unheard and have that experience of dropping the needle and being surprised. I should probably do more to resist this, but. . .

It's slightly before my time but wasn't mail order what people did before internet?

That's true, though I never went that route and honestly never saw those particular papers that advertised lists of records.

You probably know this, but of course record guides like Trouser Press had fairly comprehensive artist discographies, minus singles

Also true, and "Trouser Press" was my bible (sometime to my detriment as I took their reviews as gospel and passed on anything they dissed) but they were far from complete and out of date immediately. Therefore, it was *always* necessary to scan through every artist bin lest you miss some new release/import/oddity. Depending on your level of OCD, it could give you the sweats thinking about what *might* be out there.

Now, of course, it's (almost) all at your fingertips, one way or the other. Just be careful what you wish for.

It's slightly before my time but wasn't mail order what people did before internet?

Yep. I bought Fushitsusha's Live II from an outfit called Japan Overseas that I initially saw advertised in either Alternative Press or Forced Exposure. I used to buy a lot of stuff from Forced Exposure, too, when they shifted from being a zine to being a distro. Revolver in the Bay Area was great, too.

I remember having to get my mum to sign a cheque for mail orders. Some dodgy 70 Gwen Party LP for example

There used to be THREE record shops in my suburb on the outskirts of west London. One was rammed with stock from floor to ceiling and run by an old couple and a hunchback, all of whom seemed bewildered any time a customer came in. I get palpitations when I consider what they probably had in stock but the place was simply unnavigable. They didn't last much beyond my mid-teens; my ordering Sepultura vinyl (which took weeks to come; Beneath the Remains never showed up at all) very probably finished them off. Now's there obviously no record shops, just nail parlours, charity shops and a bizarre number of funeral directors.

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

Not to be all save-a-Spotify, and I won't claim that this entirely equalizes the difference, but I wonder whether people who hold this opinion are aware that there is a setting in the Spotify app for adjusting the sound quality? If I remember correctly, it is not set to the highest setting by default (probably to save data use).

it was *always* necessary to scan through every artist bin lest you miss some new release/import/oddity.

i don't feel like i have a process for finding music anymore, i just wander around the internet randomly and see what random strangers have to say. i don't feel like i'm living in the age where "everything is available" because there's lots of stuff i would like that i can't buy or steal anywhere. my wantlist hasn't gotten any shorter even as my "collection" has gotten exponentially larger. something like the vhs vault on archive.org, that's not necessarily music but that speaks to the spirit of our times - vast reams of unwatchable and unwatched crap, no ceiling, towering up into infinity. if anybody finds it it'll probably be some content id bot which will determine, rightly or wrongly, that the media in question belongs to some gargantuan megacorporation and remove it. that sounds more like an infernal jukebox than a celestial one to me.

If anyone has a digital copy of the Arditti Quartet's Takemitsu recordings for Fontec Japan, hit me up.

setting spotify's sound quality to the highest setting is, i discovered, a good way to nuke your phone's storage because the app is incredibly, staggeringly bad at actually really deleting stuff when you choose "remove download." this has been known for years but they won't fix it, god knows why.

Before the Internet, people like me and 5 others bought that Deconstruction record, listened to it twice, and sold it back.

anatol_merklich at 8:21 8 Mar 20

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

Not to be all save-a-Spotify, and I won't claim that this entirely equalizes the difference, but I wonder whether people who hold this opinion are aware that there is a setting in the Spotify app for adjusting the sound quality? If I remember correctly, it is not set to the highest setting by default (probably to save data use).

I'm very aware and also when you go through Chromecast via optical to a DAC it automatically goes to the highest quality

it's not even close to Qobuz 24 bit FLAC

that said it's fine for walking around, at work, car etc

just frustrating that Spotify won't offer a $20/mo. hi rez tier, because their catalog, search, discovery, basically everything else is so much better than any other service

Before the Internet, people like me and 5 others bought that Deconstruction record, listened to it twice, and sold it back.

heh I looked for this album on Spotify just the other day (unsuccessfully)

I had/have a challenging opinion that it has aged far better than the jane's LPs