Have you purposefully created a record collection or just accumulated records over time? If so, is it a record collection? 
I donāt know whether mine is a good record collection or not, whatever a āgood record collectionā is. I buy records I like, end of. Sometimes this means I have most or all of an artistās albums or just the one or a 12" single/EP because they only recorded one track I liked.
It is my record collection. It probably isnāt anyone elseās.
I have collected other things to form a complete set but not for my music.
Mine is a collection of records. Some complete band sets (like my Rush collection), pockets of a band or artist I like but not all of their catalogue (like Dream Theater or ELP) and lots of odds and sods.
It spans many different genres and the oldest was pressed before I was born.
I think the great thing about most collections is their uniqueness to the owner.
I consider mine to be the soundtrack of my life. A bit āclichedā I know, butā¦
1 Like
Very much so. I was recently invited to take my pick from a collection of about 3000 CDs accumulated by a late someone over several decades. I only took about 30, mainly because there wasnāt much overlap between my interests and those of the deceased. I was grateful, of course, and glad they werenāt just being skipped, but also a bit sad that no-one else was going to get the same pleasure out of them as he presumably had.
Sic transit etc.
Mark
2 Likes
OED definition of collection: A group of things or people collected or gathered together. so whichever way it arose it is a collection!
I have a recording collection (by the above definition), but I do not consider myself s collector: I buy things only because I want to have them to play, not to, for example, have a complete set of an artist
3 Likes
Mine is not really a collection, but an accumulation of LPās CDās and digital downloads. My collection reflects my changing tastes over the years, and my search for interesting āsoundsā.
I probably would not miss 90% of the music I have accumulated. The other 10% I would miss dreadfully. I have albums that I play regularly, and albums I play to death for a while, and then forget.
6 Likes
Taking the philosophical view:
It is what it is.
3 Likes
I did have a very large collection that used to be played, but is now in storage unplayed.
That would make it like Martin Heideggers āDaseinā - being there - yet also in itself defined by not being there by its absence.
A tenet that influenced much of the 20th/21st century popular philosophical writings.
I today take a post modern structuralist view of longingā¦. (Non post structuralist as the lost āthereā is somewhat still obtainable)
1 Like
Iām probably a bit of both, I have some specialized styles (like ālowercaseā, ādark industrialā and āmicrosoundā in electronic music or wagner operas) where I buy albums but I dont collect everything released in those niches. And of course I buy anything I like to listen to no matter where it belongs.
I buy records, any collection that results is a freebie that comes with them.
2 Likes
Well my assemblage is not a collection in the way that a stamp collection might have been. In the past I may have bought and read everything I could get my hands on by, for example, Thomas Hardy or Ian Furst. That approach never worked for me for music; but I tried with say Sibelius. However, I soon became selective in my purchases - I bought what I liked.
Streaming has brought back bad habits - I must cull my library of those downloads that did not make it to ālisten laterā.
1 Like