
- #MUSIC COLLECTOR VS FAN FULL#
- #MUSIC COLLECTOR VS FAN SERIES#
- #MUSIC COLLECTOR VS FAN MAC#
- #MUSIC COLLECTOR VS FAN WINDOWS#
#MUSIC COLLECTOR VS FAN MAC#
While collecting vinyl and cassettes used to be budget friendly, these days you’ll find even the most ubiquitous Fleetwood Mac record in the used bin for $20. And while they could have all kept their CDs in the office, freeing the files from their disc prisons let them preserve the original copies while sharing them-and the employees’ individual tastes-with the staff.ĭigital music collecting doesn’t only have advantages over streaming, it can be more cost-effective and efficient than the analog music formats that have surged in popularity over the last two decades, too. No one could argue that he didn’t build the collection with intention-it took him countless hours over the years to rip and tag his colleagues’ music to the shared folder. “When the company went out of business they had a liquidation sale, and I bought the drives and took all the music home.”Īnderson’s story reflects how digital files hit the sweet spot between the accessibility of streaming and the personal touch of a physical collection. “It would be very common to arrive at work to see a stack of 30 CDs with a note on top,” Andersen says.

He began ripping CDs and storing them on a shared folder on his company’s network, and his colleagues quickly joined in. Working in IT during the CD era, he often listened to music at his desk, but quickly tired of hauling discs to and from the office. Wayne Andersen, a 61-year-old retiree living in Portugal, tells me he started his digital music collection-97,875 tracks across 461GB of hard-drive space-by accident.


Over the last couple of decades, people who send music files back and forth have formed communities online, whether in forums like the Hollerboard-where many now-famous DJs, including Diplo, have swapped remixes and bespoke edits-and Last.fm, or in Dropbox folders shared by friends. Feel like categorizing music by niche microgenre? You can do it! Like the original artwork of the vinyl pressing more than the digital reissue? You can use whatever image you want. Want to sort every release by record label? Go for it. Manually importing every track into your own library and managing the metadata can be tedious, but it offers infinitely more control. The end user has limited control over how the music is presented and organized, short of making their own playlists. “They’re pinned to the wall, but they’re also dead somehow.” Aside from the largest titles that get top billing, every new release on Spotify or Apple Music or Tidal is presented in the same way. “I just always felt like the songs feel a bit like butterflies dipped into chloroform,” he said. In an interview with Stereogum about his reissues, Lekman likened modern listening habits to the clinical experience of a museum.
#MUSIC COLLECTOR VS FAN SERIES#
They’re part of a personal library I’ve been maintaining since I downloaded my first MP3s from private AOL chat rooms circa 1996-an ongoing chronicle of my musical history and education that nonetheless remains somewhat intangible, existing only as a series of ones and zeroes carved into the platters of spinning hard disks.īeyond all the omissions due to legal wrangling, the way streaming services “archive” music has an undeniable flattening effect, often stripping it of context and nuance. Through the years, I’ve meticulously ripped, downloaded, and tagged these records, before backing them up to multiple hard drives and migrating them from computer to computer. My digital music collection is more than just a cache of songs, it’s a record of my life: mixes made for and by lovers, early demos from defunct bands first seen in local VFW halls, original versions of classic records that are long out of print.

As someone who’s accumulated nearly 50,000 digital tracks over the past three decades, each time I heard one of these traumatic tales, I felt the person’s pain.
#MUSIC COLLECTOR VS FAN WINDOWS#
A fried old Windows desktop computer, a melted laptop hard drive, a stolen iPod.
#MUSIC COLLECTOR VS FAN FULL#
Almost everyone I know who has ever kept a collection of digital music-that is, a folder full of music files on a hard drive-can point to a specific extinction-level event in their life that decimated their carefully curated library to the point of no return.
