So disco Elysium is many things. Playing it was the first time I was extremely anxious about paying rent. One of the main ways you make money is collecting broken bottles.
My first job while at Uni was at a record store, aptly named “rare records”. It always surprised me the random shit (usually with equally random cover art) that used to sell for big dollars.
I regularly troll pawn shops and thrift stores, you never know what you'll find there. For example, they usually have a bin full of vinyl. The staff pulls out any that are valuable, but what is valuable on the market has no relation to what I consider valuable. Jackie Gleason, for example, made many records that aren't available on CD. His stuff is great if you enjoy easy listening, old style.
A couple months back, the pawn shop had acquired what looked like an old DJ's 12 inch single collection from the 70s and 80s. $.50 per disk. I grabbed them all.
you must not have known many DJs. they're kind of like drummers. what do you call a DJ without a girlfriend? homeless.
some girl probably got tired of taking care of the guy, kicked him out, and in lieu of being paid back for all of the food, utilities, gas, etc she had shelled out for him over the course of the relationship and then on top of not coming to collect the damn crates after 3 months, would not qualify as theft by anybody's definition. the fact the transaction was for $1 just makes it worse. this whole back story is 100% made up and is just supposition on our parts, but it is 100% believable. it also just adds to the legend of one's own collection. "oh that one, yeah, let me tell how i got that one..."
if you've ever lived with someone with a vinyl addiction, you know exactly how much space crates of records can take up. you also know how heavy they are. if you've never known anyone with this affliction, count your blessings.
you forgot to mention the time it takes hunting for your 'obscure teenage years' CDs on eBay, setting up search alerts for each CD to appear for ~$1 with cheap shipping, waiting three weeks for them to arrive from Lithuania, alcohol-rubbing the dozen sale stickers off the jewel case, cleaning the CDs with lint-free holy water, ripping the audio losslessly at superfast 52x, physically scanning with a scanner and optimizing the album artwork, categorizing, metadata'ing, updating and maintaining your Frankenstein music database, updating the online database for prospective fake internet points, and relisting each CD at $2
On this note, I met an entrepreneur in Maryland making hundreds of millions by buying (or getting for free) used music cassette tapes and scratched cds, and cleaning them up, repackaging them and selling them at gas stations throughout the US.
There is still gold in them circle things and them thar hills.
Another finger in the dam that has turned into a sieve. Favtape is where it's at - an unlimited collection of all the music in the world.
The winner of this game will be the one which sorts the music in ways that make sense - when I'm in a Barry White mood, I want to hear that type of music. When it's time for Dolly, then I don't want 50 cent intruding.
The sale of music is done for. The money is going to come from concerts and merchandising. Sure, let these guys make money now that they still can, but it's ending.
Thank you so much for your response! This is fascinating to me (I'm really into stuff like city pop and dance music), and makes me really sad that there's only a tiny overpriced market for vinyl where I live, really no place where I can go and 'dig through bins' to find gems :(
Totally understand your pain :| They've recently added some very hard to find prog albums there, like Planet X, Andy West, Liquid Tension Experiment, Mahavishnu Orchestra, etc, but that obviously depends on what you like.
I dislike renting in general, especially something so important like access to music, but the only reason I do it in this case is indeed the availability of some hard to find rarities.
A couple of weeks ago, I heard on the radio a program, something like, "The Frugal DJ", wherein all of the music played came off of records that the host had obtained for cheap. Like, $1 albums at garage sales.
It was fun hunting for things. It was fun finding out about the best record stores, which were always skillfully camouflaged to look like run-down used record stores. It was fun bumping into people and it was fun to have your cred affirmed by approving comments from the clerk when you bought a CD or asked them to order something from a catalogue.
But it is better this way for everybody but the middlemen.
Go to a record store, pick at random a few from the 'news' section, listen and repeat until you have a few you reckon go together. Then buy them, research the artists involved on Discogs, go see them play. Do this weekly for a few years.
Those guys behind the counter started kinda like that as did any DJ worth his/her salt, and honestly I don't think there's a better way of music discovery. Having something physically there, staring at you reminding you that you forked out cash for it, something you come back to again and again forms an authentic experience that can only be replicated in part by digital.
Check out stores like Hardwax, Space Hall, Kristina records, Naminohana, honest jons or whatever is local to you. Look up the event listings in Resident Advisor and grep the artist names. Actually leave the house. :)
When I was young, I amassed an extensive and impressive collection of vinyl both common and rare, bankrolled mostly by my saintly grandmother. I would stroll around the mall with her on a Sunday and pop into the Wherehouse or the indie record store, and enjoy chatting up a much older blonde clerk before filling my arms with more music than I could ever listen to during the ensuing week.
When I was older and shopped for myself, I'd drive my friends to Tower or the far-flung indie stores, and it was at the latter where I really developed a taste for the rare and near-unobtainables. Then I began to purchase Goldmine magazines, which was the sine qua non for collectors, and I got hooked up with "Record Finding Services" in the UK, which was some dude who'd walk into a store on your behalf and pick up something that wasn't even available on import in the US.
I don't know how many records in total I had, but I proudly boasted of over 100 items by The Cure alone. And you know that old question "Did you read all these books on your shelves?" well I did certainly get around to listening to almost all of the music... at least once.
When CDs came out I embraced the tech and branched out. That didn't entirely put an end to my vinyl purchases, as that was still where the rare and desirable stuff was at, for a long time.
Fast forward to my move to the desert, and in the throes of impending homelessness, I began to sell off my vinyl for pocket money. I wasn't able to keep this up and make rent on the storage locker. My records were eventually sold to the highest bidder. It was a tragedy to be sure.
Then I entered a period where I realized that I didn't need to consume massive amounts of music, and I didn't purchase anything. In fact, my choral activities gave me many opportunities to make my own music, such that it was much more interesting than passive grooving.
Fast forward to 2023: I don't own any device that plays music other than my computers. I have no turntable, no CD drive at all. My music purchases remain firmly at $0. The best music is all over YouTube as much as I want, and on-the-go I am very satisfied with public domain cuts of prayers, classical pieces, and ambient instrumentals while I work.
I am rather glad to be relieved of an insatiable thirst to consume new music; it was an expensive vice, and I was often exploited by my favorite artists as they released endless "collectibles" that I had to catch like Pokémon.
Plus that girl I met at the record store was very much real and not a bot.
I do what I can to try and reclaim my freedom, even if I can order junk from Amazon. I vastly prefer to support local retailers. This serves a couple of purposes, first, it keeps that kid working retail employed, second I might randomly find something else I need.
I might stop by a bar on the way back, I might met my next band mate.
Cute, and not the first time I've heard of this happening (car being stolen and then found with extra weird stuff inside).
> I’ve also discovered it’s endlessly entertaining to take 33 RPM records and play them at 45 RPM, causing everyone to sound like chipmunks.
Thanks for unlocking a weird childhood memory I had forgotten about! I was born on the dawn of tape cassettes, so vinyl had just started phasing out. Didn't stop me from using my grandparents' vinyl setup to play Splish Splash way too fast.
Edit: I mean he went and bought some random CDs, He discovered this really great photos but how long he is doing this for? How many CDs he bought and looked at?
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