Did the Digital Age Kill the Art of Collecting Music?

Image via Complex Original

This might sound like some old-timer shit, but having a physical product in your hands can trigger other memories - the smell in the store, the first time you laid your eyes on the packaging, opening up the plastic and studying the credits. Hell, the first time you put the needle to the record! All of that is lost when purchasing your music is as easy as a few clicks on your mouse while you doing a number of other things. And if that one song is just a part of the bulk of files you've downloaded in that day/month, it's harder to find (and attribute) a singular story surrounding its purchase.

While nothing is more important than the music (and there are always wonderful bits to be found on white label vinyl records), a full release always meant ART. And while labels had different aesthetics to approaching art, the jacket for vinyl singles and the books that came with CDs helped express what the artist was looking for in terms of the full presentation of their single/EP/album. Hell, think about the awesome colored vinyl releases from imprints like Breakbeat Kaos, where the artwork WAS the music. Nowadays, an imprint like Musical Freedom changes the coloring around and can call it a day, because as long as the "artwork" has the artist's name, track title, and Musical Freedom on it, it's fine because MP3.

Now don't get us wrong: the CD/vinyl era did birth tons of wack records, but think about labels that didn't have deep pockets. That meant really being meticulous with what you were cutting to vinyl, or what you were spending money for art and manufacturing costs. Digital Mystikz took that approach, as did many of the drum & bass labels before the big boom. If it wasn't killing it as a dubplate, it probably wasn't making it past that stage. That meant that the best of the best (or at least the best that a particular producer could give). These days, most producers end up posting everything on their SoundClouds, which is cool if you're deadmau5 and have fans that are interesting in your alternate takes and movements, but if you're a producer with one banger and what appears to be a bunch of garbage tunes on your SoundCloud, that cuts right into people caring about what you have on the way.

Music is one of the most important things in our lives... to some of us, music is our lives. And it kills us when we see documentaries like Dub Echoes, where reels upon reels of old school dub music is sitting, stacked on top of each other in a basement. That's history lying around! With the digital craze, that's not to say that a hard drive failure doesn't hurt, you can just as easily have that data backed up in a number of places. If you have a deep collection of vinyl, and a fire wipes all of it out? That's history that's gone. That's history that won't be as easy to replace as sending a Facebook update asking for tunes. And it can be frustrating.

That's not to say that you can't own or hold a tune as an exclusive in the digital age, but it's far easier to have those tunes slip out into the public today than it was back before the digital age. Just take the drum & bass scene, for example. Part of that scene's strength (and, admittedly, it's downfall) was the rich dubplate scene. If you wanted those exclusive, pre-release tunes it wasn't about hitting someone on AIM and getting a 320kbps MP3 (or a .wav, if you were lucky); you had to be in London, and you had to be at a particular establishment that cut vinyl. Or whatever other seedy alleyway guys like Goldie would meet DJs to share tunes. It was protected, and turned the DJs into a real collective, a real unit. When the Internet exploded, the MP3 rose, and the ability to trade files was easier than ever. That also lead to leaks, either via hackers or other untrustworthy fellows who would let tunes slip into the ether. Nowadays, it might not be as easy as DMing Tiesto for his album, but it's almost astonishing when you can't find a clip of a forthcoming tune in some format on the Internet.

When a DJ got out of the DJ game, they ended up coming into some cash. Why? Most of them would not only sell whatever decks and mixers they had, but they'd obviously be unloading the crates of records they collected and had no use for. You should see some of the people we've come across, setting aside time from their day to go to their friend's house and go through whatever vinyl they were selling off. Even if you just collect records for at-home listening - selling off your vinyl and CDs could bring you some decent coin. If you're coming up now, you can't really put a price on the music you're holding. If you told someone you were selling a 2TB hard drive full of music, unless they're a real fan, they'd just want to find out how old the hard drive was. And while we've seen people try, selling data CDs or DVDs of music is pretty fucking illegal... and not lucrative (at least for other smart humans who know they could probably grab the same tunes on the Internets).