Wax Trash and Vinyl Treasures: Record Collecting as a Social Practice

Technological adoption and use after mass market displacement: The case of the LP record

“…Some people want to listen to music which happens to be only available on LPs-either because it dates back to an era in which no major alternatives were available and was never reissued on newer formats, or because the music belongs to some contemporary fringe genre which strongly embraces the LP (e.g. Hayes, 2006;Shuker, 2010). 5.…”

A critical survey of museum collections of popular music in the United Kingdom

“…While some studies have taken account of collection practices related to material such as posters, T-shirts and ephemera (Fiske 1992;Cavicchi 1998), much of the work on collecting has attended to recorded sound collections, from studies of record collecting (e.g. Plasketes 1992; Straw, 1997;Yochim and Biddinger, 2008;Shuker, 2010) to bootleg collectors and tape traders (Marshall 2003), through to examinations of how individuals collect and organise digital music files (McCourt, 2005;Kibby, 2009;Magaudda, 2011). Beyond this, as Shuker notes in his study of record collectors, there is a need to investigate how institutional collections reconstruct and represent the musical past (2010: 205-6).…”

Sonic Artefacts: "Record Collecting" in the Digital Age

“…Straw (2000aStraw ( , 2000b refers to outof-print recordings in particular as "obsolete objects" and "exhausted commodities" which persist in physical form long after their initial commercial life cycle and economic value has passed. Nevertheless, these physical artefacts may gain new value as collector's items, with some collectors willing to pay substantial sums in order to gain ownership of them (see Shuker 2010). Straw (2000a) argues that the collection of outdated products of the past has a tendency to level out the differences in prestige and ambition that had originally led them to become obsolete, hence leading to a recasting of perceptions and of value.…”

“…This article discusses how the fan practice of record collecting (Shuker 2010(Shuker , 2014 has developed with the emergence of digital forms of communication and distribution since the turn of the millennium. It begins to address one of several questions raised by Mark Duffett in Understanding Fandom: "to what extent is collecting premised on the ownership of the collected item or their rarity value"?…”

“…Record collecting has often been characterized as a form of commodity fetishism focused on the accumulation of physical artefacts and the development of specialized knowledge (Bennett and Rogers 2016;Shuker 2010Shuker , 2014; see also Pearce 1992Pearce , 1995, on collecting more generally). Shuker (2014: 168) refers to these activities as forms of "secondary involvement", typified by fans who do more than collect the core releases of an artist.…”