“Never Mind What’s Been Selling, It’s What You’re Buying”: Capital Exchange in Buying, Collecting, and Selling Vinyl Records
Friday, March 19th, 2010[This is another Friday in which I'm traveling, and thus unable to spin my CHIRP radio show and post the playlist here for your enjoyment. Instead, as last time, I'm posting a conference paper from last year on record collecting. I spent a lot of time last year working on this project, culminating (for now) in this two conference presentations. Feedback was great, and I plan on corralling everything into an article for publication in the very near future. For now, though, you'll have to wade through these presentations and let me know how close to the mark I'm getting. Anecdotal experience and feedback is always welcome!]
Preamble / By Way of Introduction
This afternoon, I’m presenting a component of my research into vinyl record fairs and record collecting. Existing discourse on record collecting, with a few notable exceptions, focuses on profiling record collectors.[1] Collectors are typically presented as anti-social, obsessive-compulsive cultural curators—what popular music scholar Roy Shuker has called the High Fidelity stereotype, after the popular novel by Nick Hornby (and film by Stephen Frears, starring John Cusack).[2] We repeatedly learn about collectors’ goals, reasons for preferring records over other media, and the shocking extremes to which collectors go for their collections. What these profiles never fully comment upon, however, is what the phenomenon of record collecting as a whole contributes to our society’s broader understanding and usage of music recordings. Indeed, the question “Why do people collect records?” I find to be unsatisfying, if not because the answers are simple then because there are simply too many of them to be useful for a broader understanding of the forces at work.
Instead, I’m interested in what we can learn about music recordings as commodities in contemporary Western society through studying record circulation: that is, the buying, collecting, and selling of records. What types of value and capital inform the exchange of music recordings? To what degree are these processes of exchange dependent upon the lived experiences, emotional lives, and individual interactions of and between individuals? And finally, in what ways can these subjectivities inform responsible research into musical cultures and communities?
In this presentation, I will focus on the forces that inform the moment of exchange itself—that is, the moment when record collectors pay record fair dealers actual money for physical records. The Fugazi refrain from which this paper’s title is taken criticizes contemporary consumption practices as subverting individuality in favor of socio-cultural conformity, encouraging me to look more closely at the role of agency in consumption. My proposal, drawing from Arjun Appadurai’s concept of commodity value,[3] is that the moment of exchange is structured and disciplined by a broad confluence of mutable values that differ from collector to collector, from dealer to dealer, from record to record, and potentially from moment to moment, depending on individual life circumstances, expectations, business and collecting philosophies, and cultural, economic, and social capital. This work is based on ethnographic research at Chicago-area record fairs conducted over the last three years, interviews with record fair dealers, organizers, and collectors, and a survey of 30 vendors and 65 collectors at a record fair in April, 2009.