The Death of the Record Collection

it just feels like mental clutter to me. that's all.

I'm with whomever said there are very few people whose entire collection of music I would be interested in.

And I'd be surprised if any of those people are going to be handing the "keys" to their entire collection.

it just feels like mental clutter to me. that's all.

understood. that's a consequence of wanting to personally maintain the concept of "record collection", right? the need to know and have a handle on every piece of music that you have access to. i don't think there's anything wrong with that, but i think there's a happy medium between having no "collection" whatsover, just tapping into the music ether willy nilly, and feeling so overwhelmed that you'd turn down access to a bunch of new (to you) music.

understood. that's a consequence of wanting to personally maintain the concept of "record collection", right? the need to know and have a handle on every piece of music that you have access to. i don't think there's anything wrong with that,

ah yeah i get what you're saying, it is clutter to me because i have some nagging feeling i should really make an effort to listen to everything i "have"

but anyway i dunno maybe i'm just not made for the future or whatever, it's too late for me!

yes i feel enough pressure due to the 50-record backlog sitting on top of my shelves....

"the idea that a someone with their own "hi-fi" can't figure out how to get a mp3 to play on it is pretty lol40.. wtf"

btw i meant this, more, as a counter-argument to the spotify thing, not the broader issue of availability: the idea that now you can stream all this music it's the final nail in the coffin

i can get from the spotify stream to the cd player in another room, but not ... conveniently. (if i could get it on a phone, yeah, that's a much shorter wire /: )

if i got a shit ton of new music, i'd be compelled to listen to it on shuffle until all tracks were rated, so you and i are in the same camp. but i'd still take the music, and if it took me months to get through it all, that's fine. my outlook might be different if i didn't have minimum 8 hours of listening time per weekday.

yeah i have like 2 or 3.

if someone offered me their hard drive full of music, tbh i'd probably pass. if someone offered me their physical record collection, i'd totally take it up (prob after a quick glance tho)

why is getting that much music "good" in comparison to, i don't know, carefully building a collection over years of stuff that has personal meaning to you?

My answers to this are solar systems away from Dan's; random new music knocks my socks off on a weekly basis. Nevertheless, they should be self-evident to anyone who's clocked countless hours in record stores:

1. Cuz I want to hear x record RIGHT NOW!

2. Cuz I'm sick of looking for x record for years. I already have the context for mountains of records (see call all destroyer above). Now I want them to be there! Anywhere!!

3. Cuz looking through mountains of records can get frustrating/boring/finger blackening*, esp. when you can't find x record you've been looking for for years. (* Don't really care about this; just being cranky.)

4. Cuz 69.89% of record store employees are mean and/or socially underdeveloped. Dude just stared at me dumbfounded and a bit terrified when I said "hello" to him.

5. Cuz if the record store owner with whom you've established a good trading relationship is gone one day, then one of their underlings will act all tough and important and give you a shitty trade.

6. Cuz I spent $30 (a lot for me) for a Miles bootleg on CD that never worked. This was at a non-annual/seasonal record convention so I couldn't go back and beat dude's ass in with said CD.

7. Cuz most bootlegs suck. They should be free. My wisest record convention move was passing up a triple vinyl Prince: Small Club 2nd Show That Night for $65. It sucks.

8. Cuz most of the records (that I'd never heard of before) in Chuck Eddy's Stairway to Hell suck. They should be free.

9. Cuz people take too long looking at records, sometimes on purpose. Dude, you just passed up Godz 2. You KNOW I want it! Move the fuck over now! (P.S. Terrible, terrible record.)

10. Um, dude, can you pull that Insect Trust record out of your flooded ass basement sometime soon?? I've been asking for it for like a DECADE!! Plus I bought all your flood-damaged West End 12"s already. You owe it to me!

In other words, brotherlovesdub, please be my friend.

how is any of that an argument for getting a large amount of music all at once

After around 6 or 7 years of not buying any music and downloading it all, i bought myself a new turntable 18 months ago which re-ignited my love of vinyl.. my collection was around 1000 lps, and i've spent the last year buying huge amounts of (used) vinyl - last trip to london i snagged around 50 lp's in one day...... (mostly bargain bin stuff)..

My collection is nearing 1500 lps now and i hardly download a thing these days..

i thought we did record store neurosis recently on another thread.

9. Cuz people take too long looking at records, sometimes on purpose. Dude, you just passed up Godz 2. You KNOW I want it! Move the fuck over now! (P.S. Terrible, terrible record.)

RONG!

how is any of that an argument for getting a large amount of music all at once

Cuz it eliminates all the record store hassle I listed above. Plus maybe, just maybe brotherlovesdub has that Pete Fowler single I've been looking for on his hard drive that's he's going to give me. I got PLENTY of context for it; now I just want to hear the fucker!

Clearly, I'm that crybaby Howdy Doody punk throwing a temper tantrum in that cartoon on the back of some of the Killed By Death comps.

my outlook might be different if i didn't have minimum 8 hours of listening time per weekday

*Jealous*

Serious question, though: when you say i'd be compelled to listen to it on shuffle until all tracks were rated, how many listens-per-track do you think that'd take you?

I think one of the biggest deal-breakers with the hard drive of music is that it would just be a less fun supplement to what I do anyway? Like a lot of people are saying, we *already* get way too much music all the time (and are alternately underwhelmed/overwhelmed/just whelmed by it) so a mystery hard drive on top of all that just seems kinda like something that I would definitely put waaay on the backburner. I wouldn't turn it down, but it just doesn't seem as fun (and clearly a record collector's idea of fun is NOT FUN for most people but hey). Record collectors not into the death of record collections? Non-record collectors kinda ok with it?

Yeah I love music and like listening to a massive variety and knowing a little about a lot, but I don't care at all about collecting anything other than access. I couldn't care less about liner notes. So as said upthread people who like to collect and hold and own all that stuff get to reap the benefits of all the rest of us trying to divest and declutter.

I couldn't care less about liner notes.

Sad. :(

but if we all cared about the same stuff this place would be even boringer

caring about stuff is no problem, but imo not caring about stuff is a pretty big one.

Yeah lack of liners is one drawback to the gimme your hard drive pleasekthxbye scenario. But even there, the more adventurous files include them as pdfs.

i'm glad there are liner notes out there for people who are into liner notes.

how many listens-per-track do you think that'd take you?

just one. the ratings aren't set in stone. if i hear a track again and don't agree with my own rating of it, it's just as easy to change it.

Oh, absolutely -- but again, it just highlights the differences between us all in the way we listen to music, I guess. Perhaps it's a throwback to when I was so skint I'd go to a record fair and only be able to afford one 7", but I'm conditioned now to need multiple listens before I can really make my mind up. (Not that this has stopped me shooting my mouth off on ILM, and subsequently thinking, bollocks, wish I hadn't said that: the most recent example being the last SunnO))).)

It definitely has changed the way I listen to new music. Must. Rate. I find myself slightly tortured trying to decide whether something is a 3 or a 4, then I snap out of it and realize it's both! neither! If you view it merely as a handy organizational tool rather than a FINAL JUDGMENT on a work of art, it's great.

i could probably download all the music i desire over the next few hours but i dunno, i'd rather just relax and not worry about it and pick up physical copies when the chance permits rather than deal with a glowing screen for any longer than i really have to. i spent a lot of time downloading stuff and in the end i don't listen to much of it, since having so much music is maybe having too much music.

What happens if I sell all my CDs and Spotify goes bust? No music! :(

I'm personally going to keep all my CDs - in 20 years they'll be as retro-cool as 8tracks and vinyl.

that's why i give them my library xml file and the other metadata folders for iTunes. all you have to do is launch iTunes and hold down Option, then select my library and voila.

I was thinking about you and your metadata, and wishing everybody else paid the same attention, when I added those Le Hammond Inferno files earlier on. No fields filled in except the track names ... which were mostly wrong. Grah.

haven't read the whole thread (sorry, at work). but since i wrote my comment at the top of the thread (as next grozart), i've had a chance to check out spotify and yeah it's really good. i don't have it at home because my "music" pc isn't attached to the net and i refuse to play things through crappy laptop speakers...

but as i say, i did attend a house party where instead of playing cds they just had spotify running and people got to pick the tunes they wanted, which i thought was great. of course you did get the same stereo-hogs you always get at parties, but it was a great way to run things.

the only problem was when i got round to choosing songs, i had nothing to work with. i was presented with a blank screen and for the life of me i couldn't think of anything to put on.

that said, i do understand there are ways to share playlists and stuff, so that's probably a mitigating factor.

it is interesting though, to think that in five years i've managed to sell off or get rid of 90% of my CD collection, and soon my HD full of music that I've lovingly compiled and categorised since the age of ten will soon be completely redundant. CDs won't have the same resale value as vinyl and MP3s aren't worth anything at all, so i can't see why having a music collection that isn't on vinyl would be worth anyone's while.

Couple random thoughts here:

Lately, I've been very happy with artists/labels who do the buy the vinyl, get a free download deal. I think this is a great compromise as it satisfies my need to collect, but I can still dump it on the iPod.

I was recently given a $10 gift certificate for iTunes and it posed me with a real challenge: I had a real hard time picking an album that wasn't so great that I needed to have a physical copy of it, but that was good enough to justify spending $10 to download. I finally chose the new Dirty Projectors, which seems like a just-right choice.

i've never had any sort of record collection. except about 1000 classical music cds, but only for learning and uni. most classical music just doesn't transfer well to other formats.

until audiogalaxy/napster i just copied everything onto cassette/vhs(!) from a family friend who was a pretty serious collector.

i think a lot of critics, writers and you guys will have an interesting role to play as tastemakers. personally, i can usually tell if a few people on here really like something, i should check it out. some writing on the internet makes for fantastic 'liner notes' to compliment the music. so music still has this great community/shared thing, it's just on a smaller scale.

i guess my shopping/crate digging equivalent is those times, perhaps once a week, when i'll spend the night on the net hunting down new stuff. to me, that's more exciting than browsing the racks at a record shop. i get to sample everything and its a great feeling when i finally find what i might not have known i wanted.

i don't use spotify though, too much freedom, like dog latin said, i can never think of anything interesting when confronted with that much freedom. i organise my mp3 collection by month these days. if i can't remember the name of something i'll usually remember roughly when i heard it. i also love the random function. skipping through a library of stuff, coming across something and thinking "wow where the fuck did this come from, this is ace."

i do love dance music on vinyl, there's something engrained in the culture there. so anything that i think i'd want to play out in a dj sense, i'll buy. but i'm not a collector, i'd rather have a small collection out of which i can make a good set and then just let that grow and shrink as and when my tastes change.

sometimes i feel a bit guilty about getting so much for free. but really, i couldn't give a fuck about the majority of musician's getting paid for their recordings. i've said this before on here - most of the musicians i know that actually put in a 40+ hour week are pretty good at what they do and get paid well for it. they might teach, get arts based funding, play lots of shows, do corporate functions, session work, play in an orchestra, sell cds/merch/downloads/records, dj on the side, busk, produce/engineer for other people, do workshops etc. there's a good living to be made in a combination of those there.

it's hard work doing a bunch of stuff like that, but hey, you're getting paid to do music for a living, the thing you love, don't complain. i get the feeling the folk that do complain make an album, record it, tour it and expect to be raking it in. shit has only and will only ever be like that for a select few, work towards it, sure, but don't expect it.

painting comparisons always seem to fail, but painters don't spend 2 months on a painting, put a picture of it on flickr and expect to be paid 2.99 for it. for me its the same with music, you're always getting a fake no matter what format. i'd happily pay a tenner to hear/see something as the artist intended though. like a listening party with an incredible sound system, or y'know, a gig.

anyway just some of my thoughts

death of the music magazine link on death of the record collection thread:

http://www.slate.com/id/2223381/pagenum/all/

i didn't know that blender went out of business! shows how much i pay attention to things.

i blame ilm

>>but as i say, i did attend a house party where instead of playing cds they just had spotify running and people got to pick the tunes they wanted, which i thought was >>great. of course you did get the same stereo-hogs you always get at parties, but it was a great way to run things.

Sounds like a tupperware party. Seriously, the host should get a commission. Which makes for a good etiquette question - should the guests change the hosts' music? Personally, I like going to a party and listening to someone else's music for a change.

until they start playing the postal service

*obv i have no idea what the oh no lol pedestrian taste band is anymore

it is a joy to visit a friend's house who doesn't even own a computer, has a fantastic jazz, funk, downtempo, deep house collection, makes a great brew, a lovely dog, some nice plants, a generous nature and a lot of weed. man, saying that, when i grow up i want to be that guy.

some people who host parties have crap music taste, or are two busy running around making people aren't throwing up all over the stairwell walls to want to worry about changing cds on the stereo.

making sure people aren't throwing up...

fuck my writing is plummeting to new depths.

at my wedding reception i had iTunes DJ set up and since all my friends are dorks, they all had iPhones that could connect via Remote to my library and request songs/vote for other requests etc. it worked out great.

i've never had any sort of record collection. except about 1000 classical music cds

okay lol

hee hee

I bought some CDs and records today.

did you take an autogyro to the store?

some people who host parties have crap music taste, or are two busy running around making people aren't throwing up all over the stairwell walls to want to worry about changing cds on the stereo

Well, you wouldn't go to that party to hear music, and if you did, it wouldn't be a major tragedy.

i don't go to parties to hear music though...

i go there to throw up in the stairwell.

sometimes i feel a bit guilty about getting so much for free. but really, i couldn't give a fuck about the majority of musician's getting paid for their recordings. i've said this before on here - most of the musicians i know that actually put in a 40+ hour week are pretty good at what they do and get paid well for it. they might teach, get arts based funding, play lots of shows, do corporate functions, session work, play in an orchestra, sell cds/merch/downloads/records, dj on the side, busk, produce/engineer for other people, do workshops etc. there's a good living to be made in a combination of those there.

would like to point out my huge objection to this, but also really really dont want to derail this thread with that because weve talked around it a billion gazillion times already.