Comment by sbarre
5 hours ago
I guess buying the vinyl is like buying a shirt or a poster now?
I support artists I like by going to their shows and buying lossless digital copies where possible (even if I listen to their music elsewhere).
But I don't want or need more physical "stuff".
I still have my old BluRay collection which I build up from the mid 2000. This already was the replacement of the DVDs I had before. They still sit in the shelve because I don’t know what else to do with the space. Same goes for books etc. I mean I really like the covers etc and the fact one has a physical token. But I simply have too much of it in my house already. And replacing the stuff yet again feels useless. I also like the feeling that if I wanted I could simply let go. Before someone asks: The unit the BluRays are located is a TV unit. And getting rid of them would mean I have an empty shelve. They also cover the cable / power cord mess behind it a bit. So removing is actually not a solution. I would either need a replacement to put there as a cover or get rid of the TV unit shelve thing :). Typical 1st world problem that is.
About 15 years ago I got rid of almost all of my physical media. I was moving a lot at the time (I've moved 13 times over the last 20 years, several times to different cities) and I had hundreds of CDs, DVDs and books.. It was literally a quarter of my boxes every time I moved..
So I sold and donated all of it, kept what had special value, and re-acquired a lot of it digitally.
I still think I made the right decision, although every now and then I miss something specific and regret it, but I get over it pretty fast.
> I guess buying the vinyl is like buying a shirt or a poster now?
Yeah, in some way that's true. In the house music scene almost every producer also sells vinyls of their best songs, sometimes "collectors editions", and also DJs obviously sometimes pride themselves on only playing vinyl. For the artists I really do enjoy, I tend to buy their songs + with the vinyl, as a way to support them, but I indeed have no way of actually playing them, and haven't had for more than a decade.
So here I sit with 20+ vinyl records, most of them unopened, and no record player. But I don't mind, I just want to give money to the artists that provide me joy.
Are these smaller artists that also have a Patreon? The first time I moved and had to move and get rid of all my stuff I swore I wouldn’t accumulate it anymore. As much as I like the idea of a vinyl collection I would not want to lug it around during my next move…Stuff is heavy.
Albums are art that can be displayed and one of the most accessible forms of real-art-connected-to-the-artist.
On the wall above the table with my turntables hang the album covers of some of the albums that were influential in my musical path as a dj. The records are still in their sleeves in a flight case