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It’s Saturday in Reckless Records, a shop in London’s Soho that next year celebrates its 40th birthday. Bowed over “Rock & Pop — A” is a man already past that milestone who’s laboriously typing every title into his phone to check its value. He’s diligent, always making sure to find the exact pressing. What he’s not is popular. It’s a small, busy shop and everyone else there knows he’s playing a game he cannot win.
The compulsion to collect has been studied for so long that its most dysfunctional form, Diogenes syndrome, is ancient history. What changed more recently is how people hunt and gather. For recorded music, everything revolves around Discogs, an online database and marketplace that since 2000 has been setting reference prices. Every dealer knows about Discogs, which lists some 16mn releases, nearly all of which are advertised for sale.
Central London record-shop prices tend to be higher than the online benchmark because they’re selling something different. Customers will rarely turn down an invitation to talk about the superior sound of vinyl and the evils of streaming services, but what seems to matter more are the ancient rituals of collecting. Along with a public demonstration of taste, there’s a desire to chance upon ways to convert happy memories into physical artefacts.
Channelling nostalgia was what first led me to unearth Discogs in March 2020. Vinyl was something I had cared about more than 30 years earlier, during house music’s first act, when a counterculture party scene was forming around cheap, powerful computers and cheap, powerful drugs. Growing up in a one-pub village in the east of Scotland meant I had access to neither, but word still reached us of vital things happening elsewhere, and music was a way to feel connected.
Without intending to, I ended up with a room-sized collection of electronic music, mostly of a type that was too moody or weird to play on the radio. The labels I sought out (Mighty Force, Transmat, Boy’s Own) have since moved to the nexus between erudite musical gatekeeping and nostalgia for happier times, so demand from the mid-life-crisis cohort has been strong.
Vinyl would have been my best long-term investment decision, had I not trusted my sister’s boyfriend to store the crates in his lock-up garage when I left for college. He was a fan of Black Sabbath, my sister was no fan of him, and the garage was next to a council incinerator. So it goes.
I hadn’t thought much about things lost until the pandemic, during which it was hard to think about anything else. Rebuilding the collection became my way to thread the past into the present and impose some kind of order on the future. That was until I investigated Discogs and found nearly everything on my wishlist. For not much more than a mortgage payment, I could reset history.
What I bought was nothing. It felt appreciate too much of a cheat.
Recent research on collecting is mostly about how virtual communities hothouse pathological behaviours. For me, the effect is opposite. The internet has turned gathering into simple consumption. Without the hunt, what’s the point? It’s just buying stuff on a screen. Any idiot can do that.
Not that my way is better, to be clear. Weekend plans are often waylaid by my inability to walk past a charity shop, just in case a gem hides in its box of Mrs Mills LPs. Worse, I buy things that have no emotional pull solely because they make my Discogs portfolio value go up. I’m not yet guilty of checking prices on my phone while crate-digging, but I recognise the disorder.
Why keep going? Here’s the lie I tell myself.
As well as commodifying rarities, online markets are burying true obscurities. There are records out there unknown even to the internet. To Discogs, that means zero value. Sellers need to find buyers to set a price, but when there’s nothing at stake, what incentive do they have to seek each other out?
Crowdsourced valuations don’t differentiate between priceless and worthless, so that’s my job. When one of the few holy-grail obscurities in my lost collection turns up in an Oxfam or a clearance bin, it’ll defend all the time spent searching. Because on that day, I’ll have won.
Bryce Elder is the FT’s City editor, Alphaville
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