Record Collecting for Girls: Unleashing Your Inner Music Nerd, One Album at a Time

by Courtney E. Smith

  I no longer have to wait to be invited over to someone's house to see their record collection. I hardly even have to wait until we're closely acquainted to connect with them and snoop into their life. This is true even in the realm of dating. I made a profile on the music-dating site Tastebuds, which required little more than giving the site access to my last.fm profile to get started. It populated a list of my favorite artists, based on what I've listened to most. I can go back and fill in the blanks or not. This list is enough for the boys who are a little too into their records and are interested in a girl who is as well. Before I've even met these guys, they're judging me, and I them, based on the music we say we like. In certain cases (like if he loves the Smiths), it saves us the bother of an inevitably disappointing relationship.

  For a long time, I was among those who believed that an album didn't count in my collection unless I owned a physical copy. This was an appropriate stance to take while working at a job where I got a huge number of albums for free, though there were always plenty that I'd buy from very small labels or self-released from New York bands. It was easy to hold on to everything when the biggest move my record collection made was from Queens to Brooklyn. My attitude began to change when I was facing a cross-country move from New York to Los Angeles. My CD collection then numbered around a thousand. This became the limit of what I could manageably store in my small NYC apartment, and moving it, along with all my other stuff, was not going to be fun. To make it easier—and lighter—I moved all of my albums out of jewel cases and into individual plastic folding CD sleeves. At that point, I also decided to rip all my music onto my hard drive. All this was a time-consuming pain in the ass, and as I sifted through album after album, I realized I hadn't pulled the majority of them off the shelf in years. I tend to listen to the new stuff and a group of core albums repeatedly (of course including Elvis Costello, whose albums I would never get rid of on any format).

  Why did I need to keep ten boxes of CDs, when, in the years since I'd moved, I haven't been able to find a shelf I like enough to store them on and rarely ever look at them? It's no joke: my CD collection has been neatly packed in boxes for more than two years now. I don't even own a CD player, other than the one in my computer, and I haven't for years. Still, the idea of giving away all my albums makes me uncomfortable. They've been with me all this time, and I like knowing that they're there for me if I want them. It's a function of developing an attachment to your physical belongings, I suppose. It does happen, now and then, that I'll realize I've deleted something from my iTunes that I thought I wouldn't listen to again, and I have to dig out the CD. I especially appreciate their existence when it's something hard to find, like the Old 97's and Funland split EP they cover each other's songs on. It might be on Amazon or it might not. I'm not even sure whether the Dallas record label that put it out is still in business, but when I'm inclined to take a little mental trip back to the late 1990s to listen to what everyone I was friends with in Dallas held precious, the Old 97's cover of Funland's "Garage Sale" is the thing I want to hear. If I discover it's fallen off my iTunes, I'm happy to go on a box-diving adventure and dig it out.

  Our collective dependence on the Internet has increased in recent years—even my luddite grandmother joined Facebook. So it's no surprise that the MP3 has become an increasingly valid and popular form for collecting music. Digital album sales have grown fast and furiously, hitting a high in 2009 and accounting for 40 percent of all music purchases. So what sort of person is collecting digital music? Almost everyone—with the exception of the curmudgeon-audiophile holdouts and those who are scared of computers. While I was visiting my family over the summer, my stepdad asked me to help him rip his CDs onto an old iPod I gave him. He had been trying to do it himself, but somehow kept importing CDs without any metadata, so all the albums and tracks were unnamed. I fixed his settings, and when things were working correctly, he immediately stopped making himself mix CDs and started making playlists. He's not going to start buying tracks on iTunes anytime soon, but at 57 he took the first step into the digital landscape.

  While there may be a generational divide between those who do and do not buy digital music, there doesn't seem to be a divide between the sexes. More than any other factor, it comes down to whether you're a pragmatist or a nostalgist. Some people are unable to let go of the idea of the album as a physical object. The ritual of going to a record store to buy CDs; the packaging, from the artwork to the liner notes; the smell when you open a record for the first time—for some people, it's an experience that's not so different from sexual fetishism. Studies have shown that music has an effect on people not unlike the effects of sex or food or money, causing euphoria and craving. When you listen to music, the brain releases dopamine at your peak emotional arousal, which is a science-y way of saying that listening to music gives your brain a little chemical reward of pleasure that can manipulate your feelings. And like people who enhance their sexual euphoria with a little kink, some people get more musical pleasure from the obscure and the rare. The fetish aspect makes the act that much more gratifying.

  Luckily for the fetishists among us, a format whose popularity unexpectedly rose starting in 2005 is vinyl. So they can have their cake and get a spanking too. In 2011, Nielson SoundScan reported that vinyl sales broke existing records for the format in the history of SoundScan sales tracking (which isn't really saying too much since sales records only go back to 1991). In 1977, when Fleetwood Mac was selling two million copies of Rumours in the first week, and vinyl was the dominant music format, more vinyl records were purchased than are even available today. Still, in 2009, vinyl records saw the most growth of any segment of music sales, and by Record Store Day in the spring of 2011, they had already bested sales for all of 2010.

  Considering the power of this resurgence, it's worth looking at how the experience of listening to music is different on vinyl. I cued up Vampire Weekend's Contra, album two of The Beatles (aka the White Album), and Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True to put my finger on what makes listening to vinyl so special. The first thing I wanted to do after dropping the needle on the Vampire Weekend album is put on headphones. I could be hooked into the biggest, best sound system in the world, and I'd still want to pop on headphones to listen to vinyl. It comes from an instinctual desire to make listening an intimate experience. Putting on a vinyl album feels personal, not like blasting a CD so all the neighbors can hear.

  My copy of the Vampire Weekend album is brand new, never played by me or anyone, but it crackles in my headphones like I've had it since 1979. This is the warmth people describe when they talk about listening to vinyl. It makes a new album sound like a worn-in old friend. I realize two songs into Vampire Weekend that I need to go to the bathroom, but it's so inconvenient to pause an album on this record player that I decide it will be easier to wait until side A plays out and then take a break before flipping to side B. It's weird to listen to something released so recently on vinyl, because it was not mastered to be played on that format, so the point is moot. But people do it; five of the ten top-selling vinyl albums of 2010 were released in the previous two years. The other half of the top ten were released before 1985—mostly in the 1960s.

  So I head back to a piece of vinyl from a 1960s band to compare. My copy of The Beatles (the White Album) is a significantly older, original-issue copy from my parents' record collection and not one of the remastered re-releases. It was warped when they bought it (the unlucky result of not inspecting the vinyl for lumps and scratches before purchase) but has been played by my parents that way for years. So it makes a little funky noise here and there that doesn't belong but that makes it distinctly the album I've been listening to since childhood. Even a bumpy version of the White Album feels better than the vague emptiness of listening to a digital transfer of the album to CD. The crackles on my album add something to the songs, and they feel sanitized when you strip them away. I always imagine that I'm listening to the album in the way the Beatles and producer Geo
rge Martin expected I would, and I like the way "Revolution 9" sounds on vinyl.

  Finally I put on My Aim Is True, an album I know from side A to side B. I browse my Twitter feed for news while listening to the album, headphones still on, and immediately have to fight off the impulse to pause the music to watch YouTube movie trailers, listen to another song that sounds interesting, or watch a collection of video clips that mash up Cee-Lo's "Fuck You" with movie scenes. Going back to vinyl makes me realize how often I become utterly distracted when I listen to albums on my computer. It's so easy to stop a digital album at any point, and because I'm a real multitasker when I'm in front of my laptop, I'm easily pulled away from the music by one of the other five things I'm working on. I hadn't thought of this behavior as disruptive, but I'm beginning to doubt that I've listened to more than handful of full albums straight through since 2004. When I listen to vinyl, I want to go full analog and feel tethered to one experience at a time. I feel like I should step away from the computer, close my eyes, and focus on the music. I become singular in focus and zen in execution, because hopping on my laptop and doing fifty different things doesn't fit the experience. The format forces me to be more reverential about listening to music. I'm also less likely to obsessively listen to a song I love on repeat (yes, I mean you, "Alison") when I'm playing vinyl, because it's a hassle to reset the needle, and I'm frankly more than a little scared of scratching the hell out of this beloved record. Instead I let the album play out and end up hearing it as Elvis Costello intended, instead of dictating my own experience. For him I am willing to do that. For artists I'm less attached to, that willingness fades. I find I'm more than happy to tinker with the experience I have with their music and make it suit my whims.

  Just as there's a tactile heft to getting out a piece of vinyl and playing it, there's a superfluousness to downloading MP3s from blogs to sample a few songs before you buy an album—mostly because they're free and thus have less value. There are few albums that I know front to back these days, but I have countless beloved singles that I obsessively listen to on repeat and build playlists around. The singles culture has been promoted by digital music, playlisting, and the iPod's shuffle function. Billboard magazine found this to be true, reporting that in 2009 only twelve albums sold more than one million copies. In 2006, thirty-five albums reached that benchmark. As we become more culturally accepting of digital goods, it gets harder for us to have a universal cultural experience with an album. When the Eagles released the Greatest Hits album, they sold twenty-nine million units—one in every three people owned a copy. These days an album can be a financial success without reaching the million-copy mark if one of the singles sells fourteen million copies.

  Equally interesting to me is the breakdown of the top-selling artists in digital vs. vinyl. The ten best-selling artists in digital music for 2009 included Lady Gaga, the Black Eyed Peas, Michael Jackson, and Taylor Swift. The only overlap with the ten top-selling vinyl artists that year is Michael Jackson. That list is instead filled with artists like Radiohead, Bob Dylan, and Animal Collective—the kind of things that serious music heads buy but the masses are not so apt to pick up. What sells on vinyl makes it very clear who owns record players, and it's not your twelve-year-old cousin. And the absence of the hottest top-forty artists on this list makes sense. What would be the point of owning a Lady Gaga album on vinyl? It is produced specifically to sound best playing from a digital source on the radio or on your iPod. It isn't meant to be more immediate or personal, and it's difficult to imagine having a warmer, more intimate experience with Gaga's albums. This music is not suited to a turntable. It's the stuff of arenas and your computer speakers.

  Because of artists like Lady Gaga, there's an increasing number of singles I can't see the point of owning as part of an album. The songs' production shows no real consideration for the album as a thoughtfully crafted musical experience. There are some notable exceptions, but most albums (and I'd go as far as saying this applies to nearly all albums released before 1964 and after 2004) are collections of singles with a smattering of throwaway songs in between. The last time I heard an album truly take advantage of the CD format was the self-titled first release by Owen.

  This is an album that's probably owned by fewer than 10,000 people, the majority of whom live in Chicago. It is the work of Mike Kinsella of Cap'n Jazz, American Football, and Joan of Arc fame. Owen is his bafflingly named solo project, and his initial album came out in 2001. It was recorded in Kinsella's old bedroom in his mother's house, suggesting he had a certain intimacy in mind in creating it. I can't imagine listening to it with another person. The way he produced it, each song bleeds into the next with rhythmic patterns and lyrical moments that holler back at something you heard in the last song or even five songs ago. After all these years I still have no idea which lyrics go with which song title. This is remarkable, because I live to memorize that sort of useless information. An album like Owen fully takes advantage of the full-length-playing digital-recording process that was promised with the advent of the CD.

  In 2009 digital track sales broke the one billion mark for the second year in a row. People want to buy individual tracks, especially from bands whose music they consider disposable. As far as I can ascertain, most bands package together a series of songs that may or may not have a common thread (or as musicians with artistic aspirations like to call them, a "concept album") and call it a work of art. If the growing number of digital downloads of singles is any indication, then I'm not the only person who is highly suspicious of the idea that the consumer is expected to buy an artist's full album and hope it isn't 75 percent filler with a few hit singles. That is not to say that there haven't been albums I've enjoyed from front to back since Owen, but the ease of skipping around on digital recordings has encouraged my habit of being a person who knows her favorite songs and readily jumps to them for repeat listens.

  In the end, nothing will stop our progress toward a digital culture. It is so much more convenient, and the loveliness of getting rid of your clutter cannot be overstated. Plus, the number of people who are downloading without buying is swelling. Whether you're paying or not, it's a whole lot easier to get music from your living room. In some respects it's a shame: Everyone should have the opportunity to listen to the epic albums from the '60s and '70s in the way they were meant to be heard, with that special something that comes in the flip from side A to side B that was incorporated into the way they were sequenced. Or to hear CDs that are mastered specifically for that format without the three-second break iTunes wants to insert between tracks. Or to appreciate the superior audio quality of both vinyl and CDs over MP3s played through your crappy built-in computer speakers. But I suppose it's time to get rid of the boxes of CDs that are three deep on the floor in my walk-in closets and replace them with a few external hard drives. I'd like to tell you I'll miss those albums, but with a few exceptions, I'd be lying.

  THE DEATH OF THE RECORD COLLECTOR PLAYLIST

  MUDDY WATERS, "Got My Mojo Workin'"

  NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK, "The Right Stuff"

  ALEXANDER COURAGE, "Where No Man Has Gone Before (Theme from Star Trek)"

  THE SMITHS, "This Charming Man"

  OLD 97'S, "Garage Sale"

  FLEETWOOD MAC, "Second Hand News"

  VAMPIRE WEEKEND, "Diplomat's Son"

  THE BEATLES, "Revolution 9"

  CEE-LO GREEN, "Fuck You"

  ELVIS COSTELLO, "Alison"

  THE EAGLES, "One of These Nights"

  MICHAEL JACKSON, "Billie Jean"

  RADIOHEAD, "15 Steps"

  LADY GAGA, "Poker Face"

  OWEN, "Declaration of Incompetence"

  INTERLUDE

  adventures in second life

  I FIRST HEARD about Second Life from my friend Gina. She told me she was thinking of opening a virtual pet store to get away from the stress of her real life. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I turned to Google. The first hit was a seemingly preposterous story about
a woman who earned a six-figure salary in real money selling virtual real estate. There were also a few stories of people (most of them British) who divorced their spouses over love affairs between two avatars. This was clearly the wild west for computer nerds and the socially awkward. I mean, I was into chat rooms in the 1990s, but this was like a chat room on steroids.

  If you're not already familiar, Second Life is an online virtual world where users interact with each other via avatars. They play games, buy and sell virtual products, and build things. From Japanese shopping malls and laundries to underworld sex dungeons and vivid recreations of Tim Burton movies, users draw on their own experiences and imagination to create whatever sort of world they want. By 2010, the virtual land created was reported to equal the size of the actual Rhode Island.

  In 2007 MTV launched some virtual worlds of their own, and I was put in charge of music programming for one called the virtual Lower East Side. This 3D world would recreate a four-block radius of the Lower East Side of Manhattan with clubs you could duck into and watch music videos, digital clothes you could buy from American Apparel, and mean streets to walk in a permanent twilight. I needed to learn more about virtual worlds, so I created a Second Life avatar named Astrud Sands. I immediately began virtually shopping and visiting places like Morocco and 1920s Paris, where I could walk around as though I were a tourist on vacation and take pictures of my avatar to be e-mailed as postcards.