If you’re contemplating a list of cultural resolutions for 2024, may I suggest this one: get physical. No need to send your mind into the gutter, as I’m talking here about buying records. (Or if you’re a film fan too, why not get back to Blu Rays and DVDs, or aim for paperbacks if you’re a book nut?) It’s become even clearer to me in the past year that when you’re a buyer of records, whether on CD or vinyl, you’re creating an irreplaceable archive of your life in music.
Flicking through the records I’ve gathered over the past 25 years tells me which genres I was obsessed with, which gigs I went to, and where I was at various points in my life. They’re a reminder too of what the Irish music scene was like at certain points. Take the clutch of CDs from the early 2000s singer-songwriter era, when I’d go see Damien Rice play in the now-defunct Lobby Bar; the colourful covers of albums released by the DIY Popical Island Collective in the mid-2000s; or the second-hand CDs of 1990s Irish bands like Jubilee Allstars, who I found out about after their peak.
On my vinyl shelves there’s a reminder of the period where I was buying house records, influenced by friends who knew infinitely more about that genre than I ever could. Near them (because I have no filing system, sorry) are the 1970s pressings of Neil Young records with their battered covers that I picked up for pennies in charity shops. But there’s also evidence of a sudden shift in my record-buying, when things slowed down to the point that I couldn’t put the noun “collector” anywhere near what I was doing. You can guess when that happened – when digital streaming became too accessible, which for me coincided with a busy job as a digital news journalist. Soon I was in my late 30s and had become that person I never wanted to be – a former DJ whose record-buying had slowed down to an embarrassing degree.
At Christmas, my brother arrived in the door with a big box of my late father’s old LPs, CDs and tapes. We rooted through them and I became the new owner of his old Bob Dylan LPs, but ones by the likes of Doc Watson went unclaimed. What was once loved by someone else had lost its emotional value. Really, it seems illogical on the face of it to collect anything – CDs, records, DVDs, figurines of frogs – because when we’re gone, our loved ones have to decide what to keep and what to send in a black bag to the nearest charity shop. A beloved copy of a Rory Gallagher album can end up on a shelf, suspended in dusty obsolescence. The ignominy of it.
Yet the idea of a personal cultural archive appeals to me still. There’s the picture it gives of your life, a sense memory across decades. Your records or books, or what have you, speak to what sort of person you are and have been, and that each one is a breadcrumb on the path of cultural discovery. A collection of records is also a library, and one of life’s small joys is rediscovering an album you never “got into” and finding it resonates at a different age. Plus, certain albums just aren’t being pressed or distributed any more.
Another major draw to buying more albums physically is that buying albums means there’s money going back to the artists, at a time when the digital revolution has disrupted the music industry to a shattering degree. For every stream, artists might be lucky to make a fraction of a fraction of a cent, but at least album sales feel tangible for both listener and artist. When I buy an album at a gig, I know the money is going directly to its creator.
After some dodgy years, record buying is picking up globally. Vinyl has been having a major revival, while the 2023 midyear music sales report by Luminate showed that physical music sales were up globally – and that global streams had passed the one trillion mark. On a reporting trip around different Irish record shops earlier this year, music sellers told me vinyl is huge and that young customers are particularly into it.
In your teens and 20s, you’re just at the beginning of your cultural life, and every object that takes up space is drenched in a feeling of potential. A few decades on, all of the weight of this musical history can literally feel too heavy – too heavy to pick up and move, too heavy to figure out what to do with it, and a too-heavy sign of your long-disappeared youth. But physical records can connect you to people and places across time.
Last summer, I decided to get into the albums that Joni Mitchell brought out in the 1980s after she signed to Geffen. Save for streaming them (replete with annoying ads) on YouTube, my only way of listening was to buy a physical copy. As they’re impossible to find in stores, I went on to Discogs in the autumn and bought two of them from a German seller. Slipping the Wild Things Run Fast LP out of its cover a week or so later, I could sense the history that had happened between its pressing in 1982 and its journey from Germany to Dublin. Everything from the changes in Joni’s career and life, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to the fact I wasn’t even born in 1982 were contained in that black slice of vinyl and cardboard gatefold sleeve.
Now, when I look at that record I think of the autumn of 2023 and what preoccupied me, and the times when listening to Joni at that stage of her career, near to the age I am now and with so many decades ahead of her, gave me a sense of rootedness. I could get some of that from streaming the album, but it wasn’t until I actively sought out the LP and held it in my hands that everything came full circle.
Keeping this resolution doesn’t mean you have to buy every record you listen to in 2024, not least because the price of vinyl has shot up. But personally, I don’t want to leave the albums I love to linger in the digital air, untethered to me and my world.
