I’ve seen this girls posts a few times and something came up for me once. At the start I’m sure she said something like “I just spent a couple of weeks alphabetising my dad’s record collection” and I remember that stressed me out at the time. Alphabetisation is like something that a non-collector does when confronted with a collection. I’m a dad who collects vinyl and know that my shelves have formed themselves into sense, slowly over time, and that there is a deep ordering – formed by shifting one record at a time after playing it – based on my taste and likes and preferences. So I can’t critique but it did make me a little sad at the time that the first thing she did was to wipe out the order her dad had left it in, which probably looked like chaos to her. What’s done is done though, I just know that once she gets to the end she might realise that there was a sense and logic to how it had been left.
When my Dad died, I was the one who "disassembled" his workshop. There was an order to it, which I grew up with, and that order deeply captured the way my father thought. It felt right to be pulling this personal thing apart. More like an act of saying goodbye rather than something destructive. I was probably the only one that knew the ordering, so I was remembering times in that workshop as I went, rather than just "cleaning up the mess". It also seemed right that the tools pass onto the next generation rather the order be preserved as a shrine.
I’m sorry for your loss. I’ve been building a fence this weekend, and thinking about my late Dad who taught me everything I know about building and fixing things.
I agree that your dad would have felt very satisfied that it was you who took care of those belongings.
Thanks. Mainly I was posting to pass on the insight that I had at the time: that dealing with a death can be a process of transition rather than preservation.
One thing about used shops whether they are book stores or art antique ones is there’s two kinds. One simply tries to make money. But the second is a representation of a persons mind. Usually these shops the space is owned but not rented. But you can clearly see inside of the mind without understanding the mind of these people. Like, why does this book shop have a whole section of typewriter written new age religious manifestos with accompanying cassette tapes? Why does this antique shop have mannequins with fish heads everywhere?
Yeah thanks for your comment. My thoughts about her weren’t a criticism - you’re totally right the records are now hers to start from scratch with. It was just a little niggle that came up for me that she missed something about the collection without even realising perhaps. But you could be correct to and she wanted a clean slate of it and to treat the music as hers and to discover it her way. It seems like she had a cool dad regardless, and he gave her a great gift even in his passing.
As a person who descends from a line of hoarders, you really should examine why your empathy went to the dead collector and his system instead of the girl who lost her father.
When my paternal granddad died, he left 39 000 books behind. I hope you can imagine the physical and emotional effort of unloading 40k books.
Maybe the daughter should appreciate all that lovely ordering nuance, or maybe not. For my money, large collections are expressions of a pathology and there is no duty to keep them pristine once their owners pass. In fact I think it’s quite rude to leave that burden to others. Your shit, your problem.
I know a guy who's grandfather died and left him the contents of his basement. After his grandfather passed, he drove several hours to the home and found a floor to ceiling collection of comic books going all the way back into the golden age of comics - thousands upon thousands of books.
He rented a moving truck, and put them all in some storage units closer to where he lived. It turns out he had also recently lost his job, and so with nothing else to do, and the impending need for some money, he started cataloging and selling them on eBay, bootstrapped his way into opening a small comic book business, then opened a larger store selling other things, which turned into a small chain of stores selling all kinds of hobby and collector stuff in the local area.
When I decided to offload my small childhood collection, he made me a generous offer for it which enabled me to make rent month. As he was looking through what I brought he told me this story, I asked what happened to the original collection. He said he now had a warehouse full of inventory of people's collections like mine, and that he just continued to move them via his stores, shows, and eBay. It had made him a steady living.
What you do with these things very much depends on you and an ability to find positivity in the situation. A literal library's worth of books is not an easy thing to handle for certain. I grew up in a family printing business so I have a pretty reasonable idea of how difficult it is to handle and store 40-50-60k books so I'm not without sympathy. But there is often value in these kinds of things.
I get you. There was actually a lot more monetary value than even you might presume. Many of the books were worth 30K+ at auction. But many others weren’t and they were all still a pain to cope with, plus all the other smaller collections we had to deal with. In any case, the broader point is that valuing a collection over people is always a bad idea.
As somebody who also inherited their great grandfather's prized polka sheet music collection and some accordions, and has approximately zero interest in either...and has also found that the secondary market near where they live doesn't exist, I feel you.
It all depends on the family, how close they are/were, their shared interests etc. Not sure we can pass generalized comments - what if my dad left me 40K books and he and I shared interest in books? It may not be rude for my dad then to leave me his collection.
On the other hand, if I am someone who hates to read, then yeah, even 40 books might be annoying much less 40K
Maybe I let my ranting get in the way of my main point: Objects and their order matter less than people and their problems. If you find yourself ranking things the opposite way, you should think that through.
No aggression meant towards the original commenter but in my experience as a son and grandson, that road can take you somewhere you don’t want to end up as a father.
Edit:I should add I’m just as pathological as the rest of my family. Instead of stuff I collect rules, and I have to be very careful to not impose those rules unconsciously on other people.
This may be the most vinylphillic response to someone's expression of grief ever written. "I get that she lost her dad, but what she should really feel bad about is re-ordering his record collection!"
Haha honestly my point was a very minor one. Just my heart sank a little when her first video was a passing remark about alphabetising the collection, it made me think that there was probably an order in there already that she hadn’t even grokked. But they’re her records, and the music is the main thing that matters.
The only person who may have been able to make sense of the original order has passed on from this mortal coil and isn’t coming back either to assist in finding records, nor to be heartbroken or salty that she’d “ruined [his] filing system!”
And I do not think this is one of those things where if only she had spent six months studying it and doing a big wall full of pushpins, index cards, and post-its joined by yarn lines, suddenly it would all make sense and she’d inherit a magical musical truth.
> Most of the vinyls were packed in boxes or held by relatives and friends before Jula slowly brought them all home
Seems like once she put the collection back together, the order was already lost.
Appart from that, I feel like there is some poetry to her slowly making it her own collection by listening to the records one by one. Kind of like a new like growing from within the records.
Alphabetisation is like something that a non-collector does when confronted with a collection.
Each to their own, it's certainly something I've done in the past as a (former) collector - the stress you felt may be more of a projection reaction, though your observations about meaning in the madness are valid.
There's certainly some truth that the ordering of the records is important but in her defense it is mentioned she didn't inherit the collection intact but rather assembled it together as it had been distributed to friends and relatives of her father.
The novel High Fidelity has an opening scene with the protagonist deciding exactly how he's going to re-order his collection in a particular personal way.
i guess it depends! i've been collecting for at least 15yrs and i still keep it organized alphabetically and then chronologically. i always loved the idea of a 'high fidelity' type organization system though.
Yeah but that was kind of my point - my collection isn’t alphabetised and I can still find things, even though there’s no actual system like alphabetisation in place.
I inherited 600+ jazz CDs and a couple of hundreds of LPs from my dad, who died 10 years ago - and like TFA, music is what we often connected over.
Most (but not all!) of that music is available online. But I listen to them now and then, in part for the linear experience that they offer, but also because they were his and meant a lot to him. And they were physical items - if he had left me his Spotify account, I'd get no value out of it.
My 8 year old so got a portable CD player fox Xmas. Now he is playing random CDs and has both control and serendipity when he wants to listen to some music. Physical media has so much value beyond the media on it!
I hope the CD player is connected to the cloud so he can get important security updates for his CDs. Then there might be a way to add some personalized product recommendations between tracks...
followed by an agreement with the headphones manufacturers that the device be ratchet strapped around your head, with DRM on the headphone jack to enforce this
I think people assume that because the actual contents of the media are basically identical, that the physical and digital/streamed media are functionally equivalent, but they offer very different experiences.
You have a really awesome relationship with the physical media your dad left you. I imagine you play the vinyls on some kind of stereo and not in airpods or whatever? The medium asks you to use it to create an experience, an environment. Streaming doesn't care, so long as you're Consuming Content.
With the enshittification of Spotify (really? Ads for AI generated bullshit on my PAID account???) I really want to retreat back into the domain of Local Copy.
Sony BMG can't enshittify a CD you already own. Random House can't take back a book I bought in the 90s.
I hope that we have a renaissance of physical media as people realize that streaming companies don't respect our desires about how we listen/watch/read things.
There was a post on here that I responded to and can't find now. The purpose was a gentleman talking about how music today is generic crap because of streaming.
I disagreed with everything he said (he claims music is bland now because of streaming and just sort of ignores that for all of history most art produced is terrible) except the attraction of physical media. When you had to go through a process to be able to listen to media and you were stuck with it once you bought it, it was a real experience. The art, the feel, the smell of the record shop, hell you had to talk to actual people if you wanted to find new music that you would like. Everything was part of the experience.
>I felt like I was in conversation with the artists.
I work with college kids. They don't understand the absolute obsession a lot of old people have with The Dark Side of the Moon. For the longest time I couldn't figure out why. It's like the perfect album.
And that's what finally dawned on me. It's the perfect album. The songs are really good individually, but the album is a masterpiece when played how it was originally meant to be played. The pauses and the transitions and the background noise of the player all brilliantly factor into the album.
And the 20 year olds I interact with mostly listen to individual songs instead of albums.
It's such a subtle difference that most people don't even recognize it.
Personally I would argue a good DJ set is possibly a better version of albums of the past.
The really good ones mostly play their own music, but aren't limited to their own output. Its a completely coherent experience with an intentional mood that completely flows together without any disjointed pauses. I don't think anyone actually misses skits or hidden songs, just that good albums sometimes had them.
But I've given up on ever convincing people that think perfect was in the past. Usually I'm told there isn't any difference between an iPod on random or a Spotify playlist. I personally never want to say the best music was at some arbitrary moment in the past when I liked it and hope my taste continue to evolve even as I get further away from the source.
My daughter is 18. She first listened to The Great Gig in The Sky on some joke/funny video involving Mario (I mean one of the Super Mario Bros). She looked what the song was, started listening to the album, and is now a huge Pink Floyd fan.
As for DSOTM, she has it on CD and Vinyl, though she mostly listens to their music on Deezer.
Learned to play the bass riff to Money too, so it seems some people still enjoy the full album listening experience and also digging deep (freak-territory deep) into the ones they really like.
I should add that neither my wife nor I (we both have mostly distinct taste in music, though with some overlap) forced anything on her or her brother (who is 10 and a big RHCP fan, in particular of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, and professes to hate Pink Floyd, though I don’t know how much of that is just to annoy his sister), and while my wife is more of a song listener (and on streaming, a playlist listener, with she creating the lists) I’m an album listener myself.
Even when I got to CDs (from tape, we couldn’t afford a turntable when I was young so I got to vinyl after I got my grandma’s collection) I rarely skipped a track unless I really felt it as filler.
I'm almost 30 but as a stoner back in high school I loved Floyd so much. Their albums were meant to be played back to back as a single unit. Great band. Animals is up there with dark side for me.
> Organization on song within album within artist within genre helped me remember and relate to it.
I prefer to listen to full albums, but that I can do easily on Apple Music (Spotify is the same I think). And I can ask the player to play albums in a certain order. Is that what you're talking about? I don't see how "streeaming" made this impossible, it's just much easier actually.
> Organization on song within album within artist within genre helped me remember and relate to it. I felt like I was in conversation with the artists.
The podcast No Dogs in Space brought this back for me. They discuss the stories of different artists, playing clips of their songs and explaining which got them their first gigs or record deals, when band members joined or left, other artists and music styles of the time, etc.
I've always been terrible with names, so I could never follow along with pop culture songs, albums, or artists. For the first time in my life I can overhear a song and identify it, the artist's influences, and related songs. I'm no longer a complete outsider in conversations about music.
Maybe once upon a time radio provided a lot of that--before it was taken over by standardized programming and advertisements.
You might want to try non commercial listener supported wbgo.org if you like jazz and blues, for example. There are others. This is a local station, so as a bonus, there is no surveillance when I listen over the air.
If you're not able to properly seek out and play full albums within the context of the artist then that's the particular service you're using sucking. For all of YouTube's flaws it enables that experience just fine.
Yeah, I think that is part of the problem. I can find an album on YouTube if I think of the right one, but my brain doesnt work that. I don't have mental lists or spot recall.
Maybe if I maintained a excell sheet of artists or albums I like, I could brows that, and then play them, but meh.
I’m a big NIN fan and they have had great physical releases since the beginning - remix albums, singles, eps, vinyl, CD, SACD, DVD-A, blu-ray, etc., etc. each release has a halo, sigil, or null identifier designating its order.
Now there are releases that are digital only. It’s really odd. A huge part of the experience was the packaging and visual artwork and now that’s mostly gone.
... one of my favorite NIN bits of a recent release though was what you got mailed for 'Not The Actual Events' if you chose it-
The album was digital only, which I too was disappointed at. But if you chose to, they mailed something. When you got it, it was this black envelope with a very serious warning that if you opened it, it was going to cause a mess, and they had no liability whatsoever for said mess.
When you opened it, it was some album artwork prints, on cardstock... covered in fine black powder. Just, carbon black powder. With a hefty amount just in the envelope. Similar to laserjet printer toner.
If you handled the stuff, it got all over your hands. Everywhere. You got physically dirty from the album. It truly was a mess.
The only time I saw NIN live, Trent Reznor nearly destroyed his keyboard while putting on the most amazing musical performance. Sweat, dust, dirt, and glitter were everywhere, and probably bits of equipment as well.
Throughout the 90's it was said that during tours they would send someone in each city to various pawn shops and bought up Yamaha DX7's- you could easily find a DX7 in thrift stores for $100 or less in those days, the FM sound was out of fashion and Yamaha built so many of them you could find them cheap. They just used them as MIDI keyboards, with all the actual sounds coming from rack gear off stage.
And then nearly every night, Trent would destroy one on stage by the end of the night.
Which is actually pretty hard to do if you know anything about Yamaha DX7's.
Somebody wrote that in the 1800s you'd probably hear a particular orchestral piece once in your life (and if you're a peasant probably never), having made arrangements to see a performance when they happen to be playing near you.
> The medium asks you to use it to create an experience, an environment. Streaming doesn't care, so long as you're Consuming Content.
I think you’re being a bit too charitable with the record industry IMHO. Buying records is “Consuming Content”, the experience is of your own creation.
There is an artist on the other side. The fact that they can connect with you is the real experience, mediated by commerce and technology and all the other stuff that gets in the way.
You can rip music to digital in lossless format. There is no way that I would want to keep that much physical media. Back in the day, I had a 200 disc CD changer
In some sense, I'd love to be able to hang onto my dad's record collection, and bike collection, not so much his magazine collection, when he goes, but even though it's comparatively small, I know I'll have to pick a subset of favorites and find a way to get rid of the rest, and thankfully he's still got a few decades.
Collecting stuff feels like a remnant of gen x, but in my family probably comes from my dad's greatest gen parents, and the idea of having even a modest amount of extra storage space for my own crap (like an extra coat) is becoming more and more distant, at least in my city where it seems the current cost of living space is $1k/sq ft (CAD). I'd choose the location over the stuff any day, but it seems a bit silly how dramatically cost escalates, as in a hundred thousand more just to have some space for full-size sofa and a bedroom in some cases. Won't even get any land for that price, just imaginary land in the sky; for a townhouse or something I'd need to increase my hypothetical budget by $500k, which are some expensive records!
Friend of mine commented that he could afford a grand piano now, but not the extra floor area of house which would be considerably more.
And this is having a real corrosive effect! When so much of the economy goes to rent, there's nothing left for buying consumer goods. Or starting businesses. People talk about not making things in the West due to high wages, but high property prices may be an even bigger effect.
Ya, both of those points have been crossing my mind a lot lately. To spme extent I'm sure a lot of people are spending that money on random trips or consumables since there's such a gulf between buying even a very high end sports car or live-in van and a basic home.
I also don't think there's much of a concept of buying a starter condo that's significantly discounted but could be fixed up. Sure, you can redo the walls maybe and the finishes, but if the building had serious structural problems you're screwed, asbestos you're screwed, bad roof, no plumbing accomodation for in-suite laundry etc etc
Ya I was just kind of ruminating on future prospects and should have specified to buy, but no part was hyperbole. Translated to rent (which is apparently decreasing slightly as of late) it works out to about $3-5/sq ft per month, or like $1700-2200 for a studio and $2.7k-3500 for a 2 bed, probably looking at upwards of $4k for anything with land, all depending on factors much like buying. In smaller isolated cities, and far flung suburbs, it's less but not by as much as you'd think, they're all catching up.
It feels insane that in our next place, we'll likely be spending around $24k a year for a space with no bedroom, probably in someone's basement again, which is around what my dad currently earns after taxes, but it's a bit up to luck. I almost don't want to think about it, so much anxiety.
Sad state of things really, along with the economy. Unless you already make great money, inherented it, locked something in ages ago, or just prefer to live in the deep boonies, you're kind of screwed.
I had some music playing in the background while testing a Youtube livestream for the first time. Nobody was connected, I was working on camera settings. Google shut it down within a few minutes and bitched at me about a copyright violation. That was the last time I used Youtube.
I'm pretty sure the main problem is getting sued for tens of thousands of dollars per infringment for distributing intellectual property that isn't yours.
It's hardly a platform issue. There are law firms that monitor public torrents and threaten anyone sharing from a naked IP address.
Every service with UGC is gonna have a frank of exchange of views with the RIAA or MPAA once they get big enough.
You're forgetting the issue of platforms creating paralegal environments. A lot of the issues come from IP claims that would not have been made if they actually had to do the work and try to sue you (especially in another jurisdiction to boot).
The platform or the venue pays a more or less flat fee to one or more local copyright associations for music to be played. If you host it yourself, you can get flat-rate streaming licenses (ie. non-seeking linear programming only) for not a lot of money- from a few dozen to some hundreds a year $ depending on location. The DJs should send set lists to their copyright association so that they can remit to the correct people. On e.g. Twitch, the platform should technically handle everything for you via content ID, but they can't catch everything. In any case, the DJ doesn't pay unless they own the performing or broadcasting venue. Streaming service rules on what is allowed also vary depending on the agreements they have set up with the associations.
Instagram has a deal with the record industry. How the renumeration works isn't disclosed but instagram users are allowed to use copyrighted songs as long as they dont use the entire song and the main purpose of the video is to be a video (as opposed to a video that is just a song).
You need to be careful with these; the rules platforms seem to have settled on is that livestreaming is sort of OK but anything which may be archived or replayed isn't. So you get "DJ" and "karaoke" livestreams, but only live.
During lockdown there were things like https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/ , where the audience comments along but is all synchronously listening to their own copy. I'm still in a group which does this weekly with films.
> In a noisy era of streaming libraries, trendy headphones and smart shuffles, music listening and discovery have become solitary practices.
Shameless plug: this is why I created digs.fm. I missed the days where you would just sit there with an album, and take it all in. And then you would go on to tell your friends about it.
