The Death of the Record Collection

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

I bought that CD. The only thing i remember is that song about the temple at karnak

ums: fair enough!

I don't own many LPs ( 50 possibly) but perversely I enjoy the limited choice, it means albums get played many times each and I really get to know them. that doesn't happen at all with spotify etc.

^ That's the main reason I still buy physical discs. (Mostly dirt cheap CDs though.) I seem to absorb them more fully in that form.

Also, that Vinyl doc upthread is a little bit fabulous. Thanks NJS.

OK, I finally watched that Alan Zweig documentary upthread ("Vinyl"), and it inspired me to do some pruning on my collection.
My current threshold is to keep stuff only if I rate it a solid 3 stars or higher in my discogs list. We'll see how well I can stick to that.

(full disclosure, the lower rated records aren't actually gone yet, they're just moved down to the basement for now)

aside from its vinyl content, that Zweig doc is a great museum of bygone Canadian hairstyles

i have been meaning to come back to this thread to express my love for the zweig doc. it was just amazing.

I'm watching it now for the first time, what an amazing movie.

It's interesting to think about the timing of the movie too - in 2000, at the nadir for vinyl. It wasn't long before records started to be cool again.

I saw it in a theater in Portland!

love the "NOBODY else has this record" bit where like 5 different people hold it up

My 30 seconds of glory from Vinyl:

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

I think Alan is shooting a sequel right now. (Not right now, obviously.) I believe it's supposed to focus more on the records than the collecting.

bygone Canadian hairstyles

Or for me, just bygone hair.

that is a really amazing...everything. i love that clip. that is extremely relatable, too.

phil that was YOU ????

who is the guy with the long hair ? was that your friend ?

That's me, late '90s, in my old apartment. The interview was actually about two hours, I think (some more got used in an alternate version, me talking about my crush on Susan Dey). I ran into Alan at a film a few months ago, and he said he was interested in an another interview for the sequel. But I've moved since then, now this, so I doubt it'll happen).

I'm not sure who that is before me. But let me be indulgent and post a clip of my friend Tim, wondering if owning 65 James Brown albums is unusual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAleFzU9cb8

Yes! I love that clip.

that’s cool, clemenza. I’m kinda of scared to watch this documentary though, I’ve had to get rid of a lot of records in the past few years and lately it’s been making me sad. that Discogs thread too. *single tear*

(xpost) Tim's kind of a hero, beyond just being a friend. He saw the Festival Express show in Toronto in 1970 (but missed Joplin), saw the New York Dolls is a rundown strip club in 1973 (opening for Rush, or vice-versa), regularly comes up with malapropisms like Huey Newton & the News.

Brimstead: I've moved my records five times in my life. First two or three times weren't bad; the fourth time, 17 years ago, harder, and I had a lot of help; the fifth time--getting friends to help now is much harder as they get married and have families--was an ordeal. The guy that sold my house insisted I get them out of there before any showings, so I had to put them into a storage locker for three months, closer to where I was moving (so two hours away from where I was). When I got here, I had to move them into the house myself, about 5 trips in the car, 10 boxes each time. They're still in boxes five months later--just as I was about to finally order shelves, all this happened.

The point is, even after all that, I'm glad I've never had to sell them. Last November would have been the perfect time to do so--their value was as high as it'd been for a long time, and I would've saved considerable cost, effort, and space. Couldn't do it. If you have to do so for financial reasons, that's completely understandable. I have another friend who sold all his, even though I'm pretty sure there wasn't financial pressure to do so, and I get the feeling he regrets it.

Curious as to what happens with vinyl when all this ends. I've never understood all those $35 reissues to begin with--will there still be a market for with all the economic fallout. I expect my own collection will be worth half whatever I would have got in November, if that. But I still have them, and that's good.

"will there still be a market for them with all the economic fallout?"

If you have to do so for financial reasons, that's completely understandable.

yeah, essentially. i never got rid of anything that was super important to me but there's a lot of stuff i wouldn't mind having back.

My 30 seconds of glory from Vinyl:

I'm delighted to learn that the same bearded guy bopping around with grade schoolers to Los Campesinos (as linked the '00s poll results thread) is the same as the guy in the documentary who says how self-conscious he is at parties and how he feels more at home in the record store.

I'm reminded of my much-beloved fifth grade teacher who would later indulge my early morning visits to his classroom to talk about music, after I'd moved to the junior high wing. He loaned me a couple of his records and made a tape or two for me (he tried to convert me to classical with Schubert's Death and the Maiden—that took a few years to click!). Then when I was a freshman in high school (1993/94), he was killed in a car accident, 40 years old. I was invited to go to his estate sale and pick whatever records I wanted, at a dollar apiece. I felt a combination of giddiness and guilt you might expect. Still have some of the 35 or so records I took home that day, including the copy of From Genesis to Revelation that he had loaned me. I always wondered what his life had been like outside the classroom.

I've wanted to see more of Zweig's documentaries (Curmudgeon, especially), but they seem hard to come by.

That’s a really sweet story, Jesse

That's a sad story...having the records is a great way to remember him.

Seems odd, I know. I was able to get rid of some of the introversion via teaching, but just in general, I have a much easier time cutting loose and behaving like an idiot around kids than around adults.

Alan has done quite well since Vinyl. I think he's five or six films since then, and one of them, When Jews Were Funny, won Best Documentary at TIFF. I don't know if there's much distribution in the way of streaming or DVDs, though.

Finally watched the Zweig doc. Enjoyed it immensely, even though it was kind of a bummer. I am totally not joking/patronizing here, but I am glad that Zweig is still around because I felt oceans of sympathy for the man... maybe not least because he looks very very much like a similarly lovelorn old friend of mine.

I miss making tapes.

That was Harvey Pekar, right??

The pain I felt as that dude dumped his records in the dumpster. Ugh.

Yeah, that dude with the crazy eyes was Harvey Pekar.
The guy trashing his collection caused mixed emotions for me: an impulse to go find that dumpster and pick through the contents before someone else could + jealousy at his obvious liberation. I mean, if your house were to burn down, how big would your rebuilt post-fire collection really be?

if your house were to burn down, how big would your rebuilt post-fire collection really be?

I have often thought about that and the answer would be zero physical media and whatever MP3s were on the latest backup drive I store at a friends house.