godmode is a label, management company, and community for individualists. Today we’re sharing an essay from Matthew Schnipper, a New York City-based writer, editor, and Depop dealer.
If you haven’t heard it, you should check out Doc Sleep’s album from earlier this year, Birds (in my mind anyway). I love that title. Is the album birds? What birdless state is she operating in? The music swoops along, ambient techno, or beatless house. Though sometimes it does have beats. There’s some bloopy stuff, there’s some choppy, anxious drums. The cover art is the head of a sculpture, with green streaks across its face. It looks like it’s sitting in a pool of water. There are coins in the water and I thought it might be a wishing well.
The first time I listened to it, I wanted to buy a copy of the album. Would it be sold out soon? It’s so special. What if in the future I wanted it and prices went up? Discogs can be vicious. So I added the LP to my cart. Bandcamp had saved my PayPal information, so it was a quick transaction. It arrived from Denmark a couple weeks later.
My friend’s son recently found himself at the computer, wanting to buy something. Because he’s seven, it was not an electronic music LP but a set of jibbitz, the decorative charms you can plug into the holes in your Crocs. The jibbitz were advertising themselves as “limited edition.” He didn’t want to miss out. My friend showed his son that everything on the Crocs website was calling itself limited edition. It didn’t mean anything. It was just marketing.
Doc Sleep was not doing tricky stuff to make me order her album. The price was reasonable and I loved the product. But the same thing that happened with the jibbitz to my friend’s son was happening with me. I didn’t want to miss out.
I’ve been buying records for 30 years and until the last year or two, almost all of that has been focused on used records. In a pre-streaming era, I felt like I needed to own a library. The collection of a real fan of music should contain the classics, the essentials. It didn’t matter how often I listened to EPMD, to Pet Sounds, to Marvin Gaye or Neil Young’s entire catalog; they needed to be there. I felt responsible for building an archive. For a long time, the classics stayed. But after many moves, overflowing shelves, and, most importantly, instant access to any piece of music ever, it felt less important to own an album as a reference point. There’s a logic to cleaning out your closet: if you didn’t wear it in the last year, get rid of it. Should the same be applied to my record collection? If, once in a blue moon, I had a need to hear “The Reminisce Over You” couldn’t I just turn to YouTube? Besides, if I really missed my physical copy, there were plenty available to buy online for cheap.
The act of listening to physical music has become different for me too. Some combination of age, changing taste, busyness, and a wife and child with preferences of their own has influenced what I listen to. Putting on an LP is less of a casual, routine act. I listen to music all day, but often on headphones, while working. Sitting down in the living room, to dinner, with time to flip sides over and over, is a little rarer than I wish. So I usually put on something that feels peaceful and exciting, not as often challenging and confusing. I don’t feel great about that, but powering through the Corrupted catalog on vinyl just isn’t on the menu these days.
For a little while, my collection began to shrink. I sold off boxes of records. My purchasing at record stores became judicious. I spent less time doing the type of digging, at thrift stores, flea markets, estate sales, on which I’d built much of my collection. Partially that was choosing to spend my time elsewhere. There were also diminishing returns. Happening into an unknown discovery at a decent price was a rarity. The ROI on my time was low.
In the last year or two, though, my collection has begun to swell again. The vast majority of records that I buy are new. Most of them are ordered online. They are almost all albums that I have fallen in love with via streaming, be it on Spotify, YouTube, or Bandcamp. A part of my desire to own them is to support the artist in a struggling industry, to make good on my digital listening. But that’s capricious reasoning; there are plenty of albums I repeatedly stream that I never consider purchasing.
So where’s the sweet spot? What makes the difference between a stream and a sale? A mix of factors has begun to remake my purchasing habits. I’m inspired by a touch of FOMO and a desire to participate. I still have a record collection, but I’m not sure what I’m doing is collecting. I’m still building a library, but it’s more an idiosyncratic reflection of my own tastes, not a presumptive cannon. I acquire, pretty simply, what I might want to put on at home.
That last part seems obvious, but it’s not. For me, buying records has been as much about an idea as a function. Pre-streaming, there was only function: play the music. Then music on vinyl became interchangeable with music being streamed—both equally playable on my stereo. I didn’t need the record to hear the music. So, for a little while, buying music was about the acquisition of an object, the symbolic warmth that, say, owning an original Bark Psychosis Hex LP might give me. It provided me with closeness to the music’s source. I wasn’t there in 1994, but the record was.
I think that’s what it comes down to with Doc Sleep and the records I’m buying now: it’s 2023 and I am here. I want to be a part of something. Buying the record helps prove my existence. Somewhere, in a real room, a musician made this music. Listening to it on streaming doesn’t acknowledge that. It’s a disembodied way to consume art. It’s not invalid, but it’s surface.
Spotify, Zoom, Slack, Black Mirror, etc. I exist, but only in the ether. I want to have a physical form, and I want that physical form to mingle with others. In the most exalted terms, I get to feel good about being a patron. In the most pathetic, I guess the records are my friends. I like to imagine listening to these new records in the future, a time capsule of where music was—where I was and where we were. If my records are a collection now, in the future they will be a scrapbook. If I somehow miss an opportunity to do that because a record sells out or I’m sheepish about shipping costs, I’m scared I’ll regret it. I don’t buy to explore, but to confirm.
Thanks Matt!
Depending on your quantity of recordings and eventual physical space,
you may start feeling foolish for owning so much physical product -
or you won’t - but I gotta hope that the music itself will eventually
win over the accumulation of product. The time to cherish the physical
comes if the recording artist has also produced something especially
creative with the packaging that might be especially wonderful to have.