Re: What form is your current music collection in?

The bulk of my collection is a ridiculous amount of vinyl: albums, 45s, ep's and 12" singles. I still add to it and am happiest digging in used record stores for something surprising. I really have little interest in the current vinyl craze happening (I'm certain it's a passing fad).

My cd collection is relatively minuscule, and is mostly my attempts to remain hip and relevant in the 90s and 2000s. It feels stilted while my vinyl collection still feels alive.

I still have all my cassettes but I doubt they even work. I've replaced most of the worthwhile ones with used vinyl copies.

If there's a new release that sounds interesting, I always look to see if my local library has it... its shocking what they carry on cd sometimes. I've never streamed anything, have no idea how to do it. YouTube is my main way to hear something i'm curious about.

You? Is everyone else all digital at this point?

I estimate my collection is 40% vinyl, 40% CD, and 20% digital (mp3 and the like). I've never actually counted. I used to have tons of cassettes, but they're gone now.

There is a lot, though, that I listen to on Spotify (newer releases mainly) that I haven't purchased because it's free. I'll listen to music on there for a few years and if it's something that sticks, I usually buy it on CD or vinyl if it's older. For example, after someone on here mentioned It's Immaterial a few years ago, I gave the album a few spins on Spotify, instantly liked it, and purchased it off Ebay.

I'd esimtate my collection at ~ 1,400 pieces of vinyl (mostly LPs, but a few EPs, 12" singles and 10" releases) and ~ 2,200 CDs. I keep adding to my collection, and like Bip, I take great pleasure in scouring the secondhand vinyl stores for interesting artifacts and lost treasures.

I'm not so much into the new vinyl releases, partly because they're expensive, and partly because I keep hearing how many of these new pressings show second-rate workmanship -- too many warped discs, too many little ripple warps on the edges from press operators trying to pick the fresh platter off the press before it's sufficiently cooled. Apparently, all the guys who really had the know-how and the patience to run that pressing equipment properly either retired or died. Most new releases that I want, I buy on CD.

As for cassettes, I just re-engaged with that medium this year. A couple of my old friends in CO have gotten into collecting/restoring old analog equipment, and persuaded me to get into it and start exchanging mix tapes with them. So I found a good deck on Craigslist. We may not be swapping mixes five years from now, but for now, it sure is fun. (One of those guys even has restored an old 8-track player, which strikes me more as fetishism than analog loyalty.)

Mostly CDs (no idea how many), but also a healthy amount of vinyl (mostly stuff that's not on CD or was issued in the 80s when CDs sounded like shit). I have a ton of mp3s that I never listen to. Streaming comes and goes - I often carry batches of CDs with me to work, but sometimes don't want to bother and use Spotify. That and YouTube are how I test new music before deciding if it's worth spending real money on.

I have about 1400 12"/LP"/10" ers. About 600 7" singles. Ghod - 4000-5000 CDs. I honestly don't know exactly how many. I primarily care about buying music on CD post-85. I bought almost no vinyl in the '85-'92 period, but by '93 I began to realize that many tracks by artists I collect may never make it past vinyl, so I began buying vinyl - mostly obscure LPs, 12" and 7" singles by the 60-80 artists I collected to get rare tracks. Also, by '93 I could sense that the ability to make my own CDs was coming. I considered Sony Minidisc but when I read about their ATRAC compression scheme, that became a deal breaker. Years later when MP3 was the thing, this was more of the same to me. Compromised audio quality. And I totally ignored MP3s during the "wild west years" of the format.

At my job we had a DAT deck and CD burner [as big as a VCR!] as early as '94 and we bought it for a job that never materialized, so I asked if I could have the DAT deck and CD burner after five years on the shelf in the closet. That was my first rig. I'd master vinyl to DAT then bring the DAT deck into the computer room to edit on my computer. Now I just have a USB interface with the turntable in the computer room. The DAT deck was a piece of Sony junk and died in a few years of using it. In the last 20 years I have gotten very good at mastering the audio to denoise it without affecting fidelity. For many years, the way to do this best was by hand - hence the name Post-Punk Monk. A song might have upwards to 500-1000 hand edits to eliminate pops and clicks. I would make "boxed sets of god®" with 4-10 discs of rarities compiled from my favorites I collected full of non-LP singles, B-sides, live tracks, remixes and soundtrack tunes. My friend chasinvictoria liked the efforts to an illuminated manuscript hence the name when I started blogging.

I ignored MP3s - except for the things that started to filter out by favorites once they got online and started not having any more B-sides on physical releases to collect. I really resent that! Lots of these were giveaways. So I have about 1000-2000 audio files now that I almost never listen to. About half purchased from Bandcamp or iTunes since that's the only way to get most of this music. Occasionally, I see cripplingly rare import 12" material that is flat out impossible to buy on vinyl show up on iTunes and I will go for it. I sample music in the iTunes or Bandcamp store, if I must. I hate "try before you buy" and rarely do that, unless the artists has burned me before. I don't YouTube. I avoid all Google products for political reasons. They are not my friend. They haven't been for about a decade.

I'm so about the CDs. It's a massive hassle for me to listen to a DL since almost all of my listening is in my car during my commute. That means that I have to put it on my iPod touch, which I purchased at a modest price to have a wi-fi enabled smartphone that's everything but a phone [with commensurate bill], in my pocket. I almost never listen to music on it. This means that I have to laboriously import any files that I have which were not purchased from the iTunes store [anything I rip myself from vinyl, promos bands send me, FLACS from Bandcamp] into iTunes and then transfer it to the iPod. Which I cannot STAND doing. It is a hassle that you would not believe.

I deeply resent the new "vinyls." They are overpriced. They are of poor quality made by near slave labor in the former Soviet satellites. They are so stupidly profitable, that they are displacing CDs in almost every store! Worse, they are displacing the 30-40 years old used vinyl that is my primary focus! Outside of 2-3 RSD released I opted for before blowing off that wretched enterprise entirely, I have bought almost no new vinyl in the last 25 years.

Streaming??!! As much as I hate DLs, streaming represents a worst-case scenario to me of music consumption. It's another monthly utility bill. You own nothing should you decide to stop. The labels control every aspect of it!! Titles are available [and subsequently unavailable] by the whim of lawyers. Here today - gone tomorrow. The promise of intangible music was that nothing need go out of print, but the reality is that labels have a vested interest in making things unavailable at various times to drive up their fee negotiation. Stuff you want comes and goes at the label's will. I wrote a thread on my blog called "Home Streaming Is Killing Downloads" that addresses all of these concerns of mine in depth.

The gorging on music phenomenon of streaming is vastly unappealing to me. That's was another aspect of MP3s that helped me blow them off. The fact that I own my music and it has cost me over $1000 thus far this year, acts as a filter to the curation of my collection. I already have too much to listen to. Being responsible for buying it makes me more mindful of it. I also listen to 90% of my music on my long commute. Streaming won't happen in my car. I refuse to have a cell phone.

Plus: physical CDs and old vinyl [when I can find either] are at an all-time low cost. 85% of what I buy costs dimes to the dollar, and the other 15% is purchased directly from the artist at what can be [especially with Pledge Music campaigns] considered at a premium. The current state of the music listening world really bothers me. I could have never imagined that !@#$ing vinyl [which I could not wait to see go!] would be crowding CDs off of store shelves in the horrifying-in-every-way 21st Century!



Post Edited (11-26-18 12:35)

Former TP subscriber [81, 82, 83, 84]

[postpunkmonk.com]
For further rumination on the Fresh New Sound of Yesterday®

Even though I primarily interact with music through vinyl, I very much agree with Monk... it's a little infuriating the stores were so quick to banish cd's for the "new vinyl craze". The cost is ridiculous. A 14 year old should be able to afford a PHYSICAL copy of an album they want. In my 50s I can barely afford these $29 albums... I sure couldn't justify buying two in one day. CDs are a good, logical format for current releases. Why were places like Best Buy and Barnes & Noble willing to wipe them out?

No true vinyl collector is building their collection with the new releases, and I'm afraid this is a craze that will die a quick death. Leaving a hole in the music section of stores. It makes me sad and angry. A kid whose mom drops him off at the mall should be able to buy an album!

Yes, being the only kid at my school to actually 'have' a devo or dead kennedys album made young nerdy bip feel special. Still does. And I understand that today it's more about being able to hear that music than to actually "own" it. But for those who still want to appreciate the physical aesthetics of a release, I want them to have that option as well. Relatively affordably!

My collection is mainly cd's (I'v got around 800-1000, I think) and about 100 LPs. Most of the latter date back to my teenage years, but I've purchased maybe a dozen new albums in the current vinyl resurgence. Most of these are new issues of LPs I would have bought back in the day, but my budget was too limited. I've tried not to spend more than I would on a tougher-to-find cd when I have purchased vinyl recently.

I hardly have any MP3s and the ones I do have have been bonuses stemming from other purchases. Like Monk, I hate the sound of these. I still have a few cassettes, but have been slowly replacing the better ones with cd versions. I just don't trust cassettes as a long-term storage media (even though some of those I have are over three decades old by now).

Almost all new music I buy is on cd, and I try to limit myself to one cd per week in order to keep spending under control. I'm not much into rarities and stuff, but some of the music I'm looking for has been out of print for decades, or is only available via import, but I'll defer buying rather than pay highly inflated prices. I figure, if it's good music, there's a good chance it will eventually come in print again (this attitude has worked a number of times).

I kind of regret this last post...but won't delete or edit it. Regret why?

(1) owning the physical product is kind of my hang-up, and just because I felt that way at 14 (and now) doesn't mean I should assume today's youth feel the same. Who knows how I would've felt if I'd grown up with today's tech?

(2) i don't want to be judged on how I consume music, and I really don't want to judge others...if they're okay with the current vinyl pricing, what business is it of mine? If I was okay spending big $$ on some rare original punk vinyl release, that's nobody's business but mine. And I do admire spontenaity and passion in music consumption. Hey, I'll overspend on a slice of pizza if I'm hungry enough!

Don't mean to overthink it, but I do invest a great deal of time dwelling on this kind of stuff.

> CDs are a good, logical format for current releases. Why were places like Best Buy and
> Barnes & Noble willing to wipe them out?

I can't speak for Barnes & Noble, but Best Buy always treated the CD section in its stores as "bait." The selections were priced deliberately low, in the hopes that shoppers who came in to buy the latest releases by Green Day, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Rancid for $9.99 each (as I distinctly remember doing one day) would stick around to consider a new car stereo to play them on. Eventually, the chain's management decided it wasn't going to treat such a "loss leader" as a regrettable but worthwhile gambit, and began to pare down the CD inventory at its stores.

I guess my "current" music collection would be different than my "general" collection.

But my music collection as a whole is probably 600 titles on vinyl and twice that many on CDs. I've no idea when CDs passed vinyl - maybe late '90s? My MP3s are across multiple devices - a mess ... or a surprise? I purged about 100 records and 200 CDs about 10 yrs back.

Still have and listen to ~200 cassettes (Nakamichi home deck and also put a deck in one of my current vehicles).

All new stuff is heard via streaming - mostly bandcamp (which I've set up to stream in high fidelity). Use it almost daily. I like to support the bands and will often buy the vinyl of the keepers. Have bought more vinyl than CDs for maybe 5 yrs now (and more mp3s, though I still burn to disc and buy some CDs). Love the current vinyl and the pressings are overall better than they were in the '80s and more fun. On another forum I visit, we discuss all the nuances of pressings and how to steer clear of any bad ones (have yet to get a problem pressing). When the vinyl comes in the mail, I have no recollection which one I ordered so it's like getting a gift. Highly doubt the vinyl resurgence is a fad - it's already a decade strong and growing; and given the amount of turntables sold lately, there will be years of interest. A $15 purchase in 1995 is a $26 inflation-adjusted purchase today. Vinyl always was more expensive to make than CDs, so it was the price of CDs, and their reduced art, that was always the scam.


BTW - "I've never streamed anything, have no idea how to do it. YouTube is my main way to hear something." is a contradictory statement.

edit:: speeling erors

NP - Good Bad & Queen - Merrie Land



Post Edited (12-09-18 19:03)

Quote

(1) owning the physical product is kind of my hang-up, and just because I felt that way at 14 (and now) doesn't mean I should assume today's youth feel the same. Who knows how I would've felt if I'd grown up with today's tech?

Quick story. In the last few years, my son has discovered Soundcloud and Spotify. He got into Soundcloud on his own, but I showed him Spotify and how to use it. He's now 15. Anyway, at some point in the last year he discovered reggaeton music and it's pretty much all he listens to. A few months ago, Ozuna, one of the top Latin artists, released a new album. After a few listens, my son says to me "Ozuna's new playlist is really good." I didn't know what he meant. After we talked a bit more, I realize he meant the new album, which of course my son consumes as a playlist on Spotify.

So, Bip...there's one viewpoint from a kid today. And this is from a boy who grew up in a house with a parent (me!) with tons of vinyl and CDs laying around...and he still didn't understand what an album is!

To be fair to your son, Spotify deliberates directs people towards singles and playlists. Finding an album and listening to it in its entirety is usually the hardest option there, and you have to know it's there to begin with unless it's by an artist they're hyping. It's easy to go "these kids today...," but the way they think about music is being consciously directed by much larger forces.

Although "the album" has always been my main way of collecting music, I'm very much OK with the single becoming the main way music is collected today.

My mom's record collection from the 50's is all singles, 45rpm. It's kind of indicative of the immediacy of early rock. I'd say the same for early punk and new wave... the singles are short and exciting.

Everyone loves a mixtape, made up of great singles and unexpected album tracks. Isn't that what a Spotify playlist is, anyway?



Post Edited (12-05-18 22:13)