how has your record collection changed in the past 20 years?
stephen pastel: bigger, better. stricter adherence to cataloguing principles. new, old… I feel I can find it and connect it up. in a good place with this.
hannah grass widow: when I was really young, I would sometimes buy records because the album cover looked cool. maybe the band name sounded familiar but in general I took a lot of risks. I didn’t have a cool big sister or the internet. I had the radio and my local record store.
stephen the real tuesday weld: I have one now.
jeffrey honeybunch: gone back to used vinyl, which I originally pared down due to routine changes of address. have become much less preoccupied with objects in general, and am fine with just having the song on a file. totally done with CDs — too much of negative impact on the environment, and simply not that satisfying to hold in your hands.
daniel handler: it’s ballooned out of control. not being broke will do that. but the pop-to-classical ratio remains about the same, I think.
rachel blumberg: it’s gotten more eclectic. I’ve learned about so many more genres of music.
andrew eggs/talk it: I have more records now.
gaylord cf/wfmu: I have more jazz and classical LPs; not so coincidentally, that’s music I can enjoy live in venues with seats.
clarissa cf: the “things I love” section grows, and not as slowly as I’d have guessed it would at this point. the “things I can’t get anybody to take off my hands” section is completely out of control.
gordon the fan modine: I’ve never had more than a small rotating collection and now I listen to a lot of internet radio. you don’t really need much more than WFMU and RDIO these days.
fran cannane: in essence probably not much except for addition of MP3s.
james dump/yo la tengo: it’s a mess.
corin tucker: I try and only buy a few vinyl records a year that I think are classics, due to space. I still have my favorites I’ve collected on tour like x-ray spex, prince 7-inches and weird finds like that.
pete paphides: I don’t much bother with CDs anymore.
stephin the magnetic fields: I’ve given up on following both rock and disco, which I used to think of as the two poles of pop music. I have a lot more folk, and I have everything ever released on numero. their amazing eccentric soul series makes me hear the 70s in ways I couldn’t have at the time.
ian musical chairs: it’s expanded exponentially as I’ve gotten into record-dealing. I listen to a wider range of music now, though I still love a great pop song as much as ever.
dawn cf: I buy fewer 7″s.
joe pines / foxgloves: I now have 3 copies of 69 love songs: one that gail o’hara instructed me to buy in greenwich; one that I bought so the band could sign it; and one that leonard honeymoon diary gave me because he’d realized he didn’t actually like it.
jennifer o’connor: my record collection has always been in flux even when I was more of a collector, but yeah, now I have quite a range of everything from vinyl and cds to mp3s, etc. I have a hard time sometimes knowing which format to purchase a record in.
allen clapp: it became more digital over the past 10 years, but now it’s getting more analog again. I kind of forgot for a while how much fun it is to listen to music on vinyl, reel-to-reel, etc…so now I have records and jackets scattered all over my music room again..it feels wonderful. it’s still as eclectic as ever.
bridget st john: physically it is less cohesive and quite scattered = some of it is digital downloads lurking on my computer, some cds and still have some cassettes and some vinyl – I find there are fewer albums that I have bought that I want to listen and relisten to as a whole.
gene booth: chronologically ordered (almost there!); also, 1969 has grown by like two feet in the last two years. no vinyl yet in 2012.
the legendary jim ruiz: it’s just gotten a lot bigger. I love the “let’s empty the vaults” attitude taken by labels concerning ’50s and ’60s artists. want everything lulu released on decca between 1964 and 1966? no problem! I can’t imagine the lengths you could go or the money you could spend to get even most of those tracks in 1992.
tim dagger: more cds, less vinyl (though I still do buy vinyl) and I still don’t download things.
michael white: much like myself, it’s larger and has too much ballast.
shaun brilldream: just got bigger.
gail cf: it got larger, then smaller: I wish I could have my record collection (vinyl) back, all the stuff I got rid of when I moved.