House of Golden Records: Portugal’s Independent Record Stores (1998–2020)

Abstract

In this article, we explore the importance of Portuguese independent record stores by highlighting their role as catalysts of scenes and sociabilities, specifically in the major cities of Lisbon and Porto. We examine how these stores can be understood not only as spaces of consumption, but also as places where rituals are enacted and communities of taste are built. We focus on several levels of analysis: the emergence of a new economic rationale based on curation and collecting, the vinyl revival and the stores’ complex relationship with the technological and digital revolution. The methodology used is ethnographic analysis, with observations carried out in ten stores, complemented by interviews with owners and customers. We demonstrate that record stores began to offer not only objects for purchase, but experiences associated with cultural objects and new cultural practices based on the valorization of the object and craftsmanship, as well as the phenomenon of curation in the cultural world. We then analyse independent record stores as spaces of resistance against the dematerialization of music. The emergence of a new aspirational economy is explored, based on curation and on being in the present, rebuffing the Veblenian rationale of ostentation. In music scenes, curation demands legitimacy, so in the independent record stores studied, curation strategies are developed on three levels: spatial, individual and local. In the third section, we examine independent record stores as spaces of rituals because they combine the existence of a totem, the relevance of a space loaded with symbolic density and the presence of social actors who carry out the rituals in this symbolic space—that is, social actors with subcultural capital in the music scene(s). In the last section, we dissect the relationship between independent record stores and their local context, exploring issues of local curation, in particular, the legitimacy associated with belonging to a specific place.