Reason.com has a great article up today about a niche community very close to my heart: vinyl collectors. One passage in particular caught my eye:
Hynes started uploading his videos both to promote his merchandise and to spare his fragile old records from being overplayed. “I often rescue records out of garages and basements,” he says, “clean them up, make a video, put the record in a storage sleeve and only watch the video when I want to hear the song.” Thanks to YouTube, anyone else with an Internet connection can listen too. Channels such as Hynes’ let viewers hear and see music being played in its original format, and sometimes they offer access to music available nowhere else.
I actually got a chance to explore Hyne’s youtube channel dedicated to playing rare Vinyls (it can be found here) . Listening to digital videos of vinyls actually has a sort of strange appeal (sort of a combination pandora.com and antique roadshow). I found myself leaving it on as background music for at least an hour.
There is a sense in which watching a youtube video of someone playing an old record is the most post-modern way to experience music ever conceived. It reminds me of listening to a podcast Prairie Home Companion and still feeling like a radio audience in 1940s America
Listening to live or analog music (even translated several times through corrupting mediums) gives one a sense that something is happening rather than just being recalled. Probably one of the main reason people still listen to records or, for that matter, Garrison Keillor.
The Distributist 