Sonic Artefacts: "Record Collecting" in the Digital Age

Abstract

This article examines the fan practice of record collecting (Shuker, 2010) as it has translated into the digital environment of the Internet, and begins to address one of several questions posed by Mark Duffett in Understanding Fandom: ‘to what extent is collecting premised on the ownership of the collected items or their rarity value’ (2013: 179). Drawing on research into a range of music blogs, message boards and fan groupings, the article suggests that we may identify a shift from ‘record collecting’ towards ‘music collecting’, and that this shift might be conceptualised as a move from ‘secondary involvement’ (Shuker, 2010: 168) to ‘tertiary involvement’. Secondary involvement involves a typically systematic approach to acquiring and collecting material culture, such as out-of-print (OOP), rare or private press vinyl releases, whereas ‘tertiary involvement’ involves the collection and accumulation of the music encoded within that material culture, in the form of digital data file formats such as MP3 and FLAC. The music investigated in this article is that encoded in what Will Straw (2000) has called ‘obsolete objects’ – artefacts that persist long after their commercial life cycle and economic value is over; and that encoded in unofficially released recordings of live performances, whether in the form of commercially produced bootlegs (Marshall, 2005) or as not-for-profit bootlegs which are sourced, edited, remastered and packaged by fans (Anderton, 2006). Those involved in creating, distributing (via cyberlockers, torrents, direct download links or YouTube uploads) and/or collecting these music files are characterised as active and informal cultural intermediaries who curate, organise, archive, discuss, circulate and promote recordings and information, hence act as ‘expert filters’ online (Baym & Burnett, 2009). Their activities also raise interesting questions about cultural memory, the provision of ‘free labour’ (Terranova, 2004), and the contested nature of copyright, each of is investigated within the article.