Symposium Presentation: Buying and Collecting Music

As teenagers we buy music to belong to a certain group. You are friends with x and y if you like band A, or w and k if you like band B.

We are certain about what we like and listen to the same band again and again, the same track eventually for months and months.

As time goes by, and we get older, we tend to open our mind (and our pocket...) and listen to other things, new things we never thought we could like. Then is hard to say what's your favorite band. It used to be that the only we we could find out about new music was by going to the music store or listening to radio. Nowadays internet does the work for us, giving us recommendations, showing us things supposedly similar to what we are listening to.

And it comes a time when we start being collectors.
And then we don't even know what we have at home anymore.
We keep on buying and buying and buying...


We enjoy showing our collection to the others . It makes us fell powerful to possess all that music.

Together with music records we keep related obsolete objects, like the phonograph cylinder we can see here:

We want all the different limited editions from the same album. That's very important!

We want to show to our friend when they come and visit us that special record. So we put it on the wall.

It's really hard to resist buying certain albums that we like so much just because of the cover. Or because it's the only one we don't have from that obscure band.
We like to show how cool we are! And the choices we make for the albums that go on the wall it's again (like the badgets we had when we were teenagers) saying something about who we are.
We can even change the albums on the wall according to our guests, so that we fell we belong to the group (again).




It's as if we are hiding behind our choices.

We "wear" the choices we make.





Or:, if we are creative people, we take our choices and play around we it.

OWEN GILDERSLEEVE
“Customize Your Music
Part of a series of experiments
for issue 12 of Graphic in the customization of different musical formats. The idea behind the series came from my love for collecting music and the interest
I find in exploring other people's musical collections.”

Then MP3 players came, then we don't have more space to store all our objects, then internet replaces everything.
Lack of space = lack of legacy.
So what are we leaving for or grandsons?
An hard drive?