On records

Introduction

Most who know me would agree that it was only a matter of time before I started collecting vinyl. My dad is a big collector (hoarder, some might say, though that is unfair, if not to the breadth, at least to the depth of his taste) so it’s something of which I’ve always been aware. Finally at the start of 2023, as part of a broader range of new year’s resolutions (also including ’listen to more music’, ‘go to more music nights’) I decided to take the plunge: I sank far too much money into a beautiful Technics SL-1210MK2 turntable, nicked a spare record box my dad had lying around, and went shopping for my first record (I finally settled on Leon Vynehall’s fantastic Rare, Forever, of which the only critique I have is that the name messes up the csv export of my catalogue from Google Sheets).

This post is intended to detail the reasons I collect records, both those which persuaded me in the first place, and those which have emerged since I started a few months ago. It is not intended to be particularly polemic, nor is it meant to be particularly comprehensive – the reasons given are just those I have found to be compelling. In particular I am not too interested in addressing the debate around analogue vs digital audio quality. I’m not inclined to think that my setup (mid-range Marantz amp, Delta 30 speakers, listened to at medium volume in an oddly-shaped room) is such that any gains will really be that apparent to me anyway. In any case, onwards.

‘The Scene’

In the early 2010s (avid fans will work out that this puts me then in the 10–15yo range) I followed ‘a scene’ very closely. Though perhaps not quite what I listen to now, and not something very many heads have very much respect for, it was my entry point into electronic music and remains, if only in a nostalgic way, dear to my heart. It was the utterly cringe and colourful world of brostep (and its many weird cousins: deathstep drumstep, …), trap, (in the electronic sense), hardstyle, and far beyond. There were a number of labels and YouTube channels I avidly followed. Every weekend morning I would wake up early so I could lie in bed for hours working through their latest releases, bookmarking albums to buy when the next round of Christmas/birthday iTunes vouchers came in, and following endless rabbit-holes of links to get free downloads via Facebook, as was so common then.

Eventually (I think when I was around 16, judging by the dates on my earliest playlists) things moved on: I realised I could get the Spotify student discount despite only being in 6th form, and I migrated. Another post should be written detailing and explaining the negative impact Spotify had on my music habits – before we even get started on its impacts on the industry more broadly – but the key takeaway is my listening became a lot broader, however significantly less deep (‘T’-shaped, as I think this sometimes described), and significantly less coherent. That’s not all bad, and I don’t mean the above with any particular normative force: for some people the freedom and flexibiity to jump between different genres is perfect for their listening habits. Just as this article doesn’t intend to tell anyone that collecting records is right for them, but rather why I felt it was right for me, I don’t here mean to suggest that the Spotify modus audiendi is universally the wrong way to go. I just felt for several years like I had lost something (or several things perhaps) in the way I listened: I didn’t follow any artist, label, or genre too closely; I had fewer coherent playlists or albums to choose from; I felt less connected to what I was listening to.

Now records don’t solve all of these problems (try making a playlists out of them), and it would be putting the cart before the horse to suggest that collecting vinyl got me out of this rut, but starting to buy records certainly fit in very naturally with a shift in the way that I now listen to and engage with music, which has left me feeling more connected with ’the scene’ (whatever that is), and with greater coherence in my listening [^1]. In particular, because they are so expensive, the act of buying a record is very deliberate – it requires thought about what I like and what I feel I should prioritise. Not only does this incentivise listening around more before I decide to spend my hard-earned money, which enables greater engagement with the scene itself, but it also incentivises following the scene in more detail: you learn much better which artists and labels you like much better, because this gives you a useful idea of what you might like to buy. It is possible to do all of these things purely digitally (either through Bandcamp and co, or even just using Spotify), but my point is that, given its other pros (more on which shortly!), this process was enhanced and deepened by my decision to start buying records.

Permanence

Remaining on the subject of playlists and my strange youthful listening habits: something which bothered me very shortly into my move to Spotify was how nebulous my library felt. In the beforetimes I owned basically all my music: the majority was bought off iTunes or burned off CDs (I think technically forbidden, but not too morally dubious in my view). Not only did this give me control over which versions of tunes I was listening to (in the instances where there were multiple versions – see below), but it also reassured me, perhaps naïvely, that my playlists would persist through time, so when I was old and wizened, I would still be able to recline to the dulcet tones of ‘Devil Worshipping Motherfuckers’ or Ry Legit’s ‘The Wobbulator’ (yes really). When I switched to Spotify I became anxious about the future of the lovely playlists I was curating – was I then bound to Spotify forever?[^2]

More than the playlists though, I think my worry was more about my ability to look back over what I used to listen to way back when, or to trace my journey through music over time (everyone who knows me knows I am a relentless categoriser and documenter). It is exactly this worry which is answered by records. It’s obvious how they solve this issue, and I think this is perhaps my central joy in collecting them now – my collection will function from now on as a constant (and well-catalogued!) record (wahey) of what I listened to and when.

Versioning and recordings

In August 2019, Shy FX re-released his 1994 classic ‘Original Nuttah’. The new version ‘Original Nuttah 25’ was a re-recorded and slightly edited version of the oringal (released alongside a Chase & Status remix) to mark the landmark track’s 25th birthday. I don’t have anything particular against this new version, (nor am I a particularly avid Shy FX listener), but I was saddened when it appeared that this version had replaced the original 1994 recording on Spotify. In fact this isn’t quite what had happened – the original had been off since 2017, for reasons which still remain a bit mysterious (probably marketing). In any case, this underscores two major problems I’d found with listening to songs exclusively through streaming sites: recordings can be changed and reuploaded with no way of listening to the older versions, and entire tracks/albums/discographies can disappear (either by choice of the artist – see Joni Mitchell and Skee Mask’s decisions, or by the label, or other forces more mysterious to us mere listeners).

~The experience~

This feels like simultaneously the least and most convincing reason to collect records (who among us wants to admit to spending hundreds, perhaps even thousands, because they think their acrylic discs in cardboard covers ’look nice’? who among us hasn’t bought a record because it has very pretty artwork?) Nonetheless I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the aesthetic and tactile experience of putting on a record. Moreover, often the cover art will be a specially commissioned piece which is nice to look at in its own right – if i were ever to invest in vinyl wall mounts, it wouldn’t be to show off the records I own to people, but to show off the nice artwork. There are many great examples of artistic cover art, one of my favourites being Ivan Seal’s work for The Caretaker’s ‘Everywhere at the End of Time’ series – see here.

Conclusion

I’ve tried to give an overview here of the reasons I collect vinyl. I’ll be interested to return to this post in the years to come and see how well my reasons have stood up, and whether there are any emergent new reasons I think it’s a fun thing to do. Or maybe I’ll have had to move house by then and the pain of moving 150 records will have driven me to switch to a more lightweight medium (cassettes, duh).

Footnotes

[^1] It is worth noting that I don’t believe coherence necessarily implies any particular narrowness of scope: rather what I mean, in crude terms, is I now feel more able to draw links between and ‘bundle up’ the music I listen to. This doesn’t impinge on my ability to enjoy a classical chaconne as well as some Russian dub techno, since coherence doesn’t imply coherence between all aspects of my listening, it just means that now I can add a passacaglia to the former, and some Berlin minimal to the latter.

[^2]Arguably I should have felt, and should still feel, the same about digital playlists on other platforms, but (a) the collection of vinyl does not centre on (though it may guide) the creation of playlists, and (b) at least in the original case I did possess the raw mp3 files, so could in theory listen to them on any supporting platform – I wasn’t tied to any software/hardware in particular.