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Music buying strategy/rationalising

M

matt j

pfm Member
Just wondering how other people go about this or whether you just buy what you like?

I can't afford to buy all the music I want, there's tons of old music I would like that I wasn't around for when it was released, on top of all the constantly released new music I'm keen on. I'm slowly coming around to the idea that quality is better than quantity, but that doesn't help my impulsive side when I see a new pre-order pop into my inbox!!

My long term plan is to have a good physical copy of all my favourite albums, for some this is obviously not achievable on vinyl as they are out of my budget, so I was thinking I could fill these gaps with the best CD versions.

How do you prioritise what you buy? Do you have a list of stuff you want and tick it off in order? or do you just randomly browse the usual places until you find something you want?

I need a strategy so as to stop me filling my collection with mediocre music/pressings and restrict it to the good stuff.
 
I am a music hoarder I guess and I still like a physical copy rather than streaming or downloads. I kid myself that is because of quality issues, but it's more psychological than anything. I decided to leave vinyl behind a good few years back, but have come back to it in the last 3 years, that said I don't buy much on vinyl now as it's so expensive. I feel my CD replay system is as good as my vinyl and I can buy many more CDs for the same price as vinyl so that is what I focus on. Of my favourite music I have been tracking down the best versions on CD and sometimes have to pay a bit for them, but it's worth it to me. For other less important stuff I balance value versus quality and if I can get a reasonable version for a good price I will. There has never been a better time for secondhand CDs price wise than now, but I am a slave to box sets and special versions of my favourite artists' works too ... Superdeluxeedition.com is my friend and my enemy rolled into one ;) I also have a wide ranging taste in genres so my collection is somewhat extensive.... currently around 13.5K CDs and 1K of LPs... I probably will never listen to half of them more than a few times in my life, but a wall of CDs looks quite impressive and friends love coming round and pulling something out from many moons ago and going 'Wow, I haven't heard this for years' and on it goes.
 
Compromise...e.g. I have an 80s press of What's Going On that is perfectly acceptable. I'd love one of the Mofi releases but not for over 100 quid.
Use Ebay and Discogs.
Trawl your local record and charity shops.
Prioritize great music over great pressings.
Keep up with new releases and rereleases. E.g. The Band brown LP on 2 x 45rpm is out in Nov for 25 quid.
Check the Sales e.g. Fopp/HMM currently.
CDs are so cheap these days...buy them to expand your tastes.
Also...allocate your budget. Do you really need new clothes? Heating? You could spend it on records!
 
I have 2350 albums listed on Roon (so that means more or less the equivalent of 3000 CDs) and about 7m of vinyl (no idea how many records that makes).
My digital source is as good as my SME20 so, given the bulk and expense, I have seriously slowed down the rhythm of LP purchasing. My digital source sounds equally as good from CD and 16/44 files, so I have started preferring downloads so long as the price is right. Physical media cost quite a bit to store if you want to keep them in something nice in the sitting-room...

I will shortly be taking out a subscription to Qobuz.
My priority will be to own downloads or physical media corresponding to what I really love but which is unlikely to be listed in twenty years time.
In the main this means I will probably stop buying classical and concentrate on what I really like in the areas of pop, rock and folk - mostly talented low profile artists (The Beatles are not going to disappear from streaming services in the foreseeable future).
 
I try to put an album in the virtual shopping basket, and then wait a day or so to check if I still want it.

The Discogs 'want' list is useful - I can put things I want on there and (again) wait until want becomes need.
 
Even with the advantage of being able to hear a few tracks from albums prior to purchasing, i still make errors of judgement.

The errors seem a lot less now, and if i do not like it after a few plays, sell it on.

Bloss
 
I buy so much I have a record shop! Part of the reason I have a record shop is I don’t like to hoard, I only want to retain stuff that is of real lasting significance to me or exists in an area I’m currently exploring. Obviously I buy stuff as stock too, but the whole thing started off by trading to build my own collection back when I was a kid.

PS I have done much of my major buying and back-cataloging at the bottom of the market, e.g. I was buying serious quantities of vinyl back in the late-80s and ‘90s as folk were dumping it for CD, and now I’m doing the same with CDs. Over the past few years my classical and jazz CD collection has grown exponentially with many large box sets and a real dive into the world of collectable early Japanese and West German pressings!
 
I would like to do something similar, I've acquired too much filler.

I've recently bought a couple of really nice condition Japanese 1st pressings and whilst not cheap they're not silly money. This is the sort of thing I'd like to look into more, finding the right copy to buy and hoping it's not mega money.

My vinyl is split into two categories, stuff I want to listen to and stuff I bought as a potential investment, some/a lot of it lands in both.

Some of it is stuff I've heard a couple of tracks from on the radio and ordered the vinyl only to not really find it that interesting, I need to be far more selective especially with the cost of new vinyl.
 
Do you use any streaming services matt?

I don't but can see the benefit of them if you like to listen to a lot of new stuff.
 
Yes I have Tidal, I did have Qobuz but it was missing stuff I wanted quite often so I switched. I only have the standard version which I think is 320mp3, which also (annoyingly) doesn't give gapless playback.
 
If you’re not averse to CDs, charity shops and CEX are your friends. I bought a Goldfrapp SACD for 20p and scored “Voulez-Vous” deluxe, “For Your Pleasure” HDCD, “The Idiot” and “Low” for one English pound total in PDSA. That to me is staggering value (when I were a lad a CD was a fortnight’s pocket money) making bingeing and hoarding rather attractive options. Plus there’s the random joy of discovery, much like sifting for secondhand vinyl offered 20 years ago.

I’ve pretty much given up buying non-audiophile vinyl nowadays, the economics of grinding down precious diamond on vinyl more quality-controlled to be looked at than listened to make no sense to me. Most of my new releases are bought on hi-res if available or some form of red book if not. The delights of being able to store new purchases on a NAS rather than worrying about the groaning shelves elsewhere cannot be underestimated, in my opinion.
 
MotelBlues said:
If you’re not averse to CDs, charity shops and CEX are your friends. I bought a Goldfrapp SACD for 20p and scored “Voulez-Vous” deluxe, “For Your Pleasure” HDCD, “The Idiot” and “Low” for one English pound total in PDSA. That to me is staggering value (when I were a lad a CD was a fortnight’s pocket money) making bingeing and hoarding rather attractive options. Plus there’s the random joy of discovery, much like sifting for secondhand vinyl offered 20 years ago.
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The beauty of CD at present is most people think they are all worth the same (i.e. low) value. I fairly regularly find lovely early West German full-silver pressings, Japanese pressings, ‘targets’ etc just sitting in the normal racks of second hand record shops who really should know better! It kind of feels like the late-80s and 90s for vinyl when you could walk along a typical high-street and come back with a bag full of wide-band deep-groove SXLs, red-plumb Atlantics, even mono Beatles etc. Back in the mid to late 90s I used to take a record bag on wheels with me when I went out charity shopping, I just knew pretty much every town I headed to would have more easily sellable stuff just sitting there for 50p or a quid than I could carry. I actually remember leaving great stuff at times as I simply couldn’t carry it! At that time I was selling via the emerging eBay and largely to Japan, Hong Kong etc where even back then you could get £70 for say a red-plumb Yes album, pink-scroll Genesis or whatever. A nice little earner!

PS I did exactly the same thing with analogue synths in the late ‘80s just as the techno scene was starting to emerge. Every shit heavy metal band seemed to have an MS20, Prodigy or whatever sitting under a bed and they’d often let you have it for £50-75! There was a time when every guitar shop seemed to have a misunderstood and unloved TB-303 sitting in their guitar FX pedal display, and were happy to see the back of it for £40-50 or so (I was getting £250-300, they are worth about £1k now!). Always buy when people are selling, sell when they are buying! ;-)
 
Tony L said:
The beauty of CD at present is most people think they are all worth the same (i.e. low) value. I fairly regularly find lovely early West German full-silver pressings, Japanese pressings, ‘targets’ etc just sitting in the normal racks of second hand record shops who really should know better! It kind of feels like the late-80s and 90s for vinyl when you could walk along a typical high-street and come back with a bag full of wide-band deep-groove SXLs
Click to expand...

My personal best is a first pressing CD of “Dire Straits”, admittedly in what could best be described as authentically used (but perfectly serviceable) condition, for 50p, when a mint copy had an eBay asking price of £255.
 
The ‘blue swirl’ label design? I have to admit I’ve never found any of those yet, they are very rare.
 
As I get older I still buy like its going out of fashion. I no longer hoard though and if it hasn't been played in a while it will get listed on my Discogs. After all it is only stuff! There are currently 4555 albums on my network system with around 45K songs (I would be dead long before I'd heard them all if I played back to back!). The lounge has approx 1k lp's and there are a few more here and there around the house. I'm sure my matey spooky Simon has appropriated many of my 90's electronic/dancy type stuff during a house move years back but he say nooooo.

I have really useful boxes full of CD's upstairs and one thing I noticed recently was a few multi packs and classical discs had a kind of light foam sheet in the case for protection. Over time this had glued itself to the discs and left them mottled. It did not affect play but I'd be a bit pissed if someone sold me one and the damage was extensive.

As for the collector instinct.....it is just stuff (I am currently fighting the urge to own more then three wristwatches!) and you can't take it with you.
 
zygote23 said:
I have really useful boxes full of CD's upstairs and one thing I noticed recently was a few multi packs and classical discs had a kind of light foam sheet in the case for protection. Over time this had glued itself to the discs and left them mottled. It did not affect play but I'd be a bit pissed if someone sold me one and the damage was extensive.
Click to expand...

I actually started a thread about this ages ago, mainly regarding classical vinyl boxes, but it applies equally to certain lovely early CD fat-case multi-disc sets too. Basically go through everything in your collection discarding any foam right now as it will do real damage if left alone!
 
One upside to this collecting is finding stuff I no longer play that is in demand! I had an extensive collection of COIL vinyl and CD which ended up being worth a small fortune. Yesterday I discovered some 'Mouse on the Keys' vinyl which also seems to be listed for plenty dollar on discogs.

Oh the joys of having an eclectic taste in music.
 
Yes, I’ve done well from that too. The combination of left-field taste and audiophile obsessiveness (everything in Nagaoka inners etc) has served me very well over the years! It has also meant I have a lot of very nice original pressings of stuff I love that I’d not be prepared to pay the current collector market price to buy, e.g. loads of Krautrock, Factory, Bowie, avant garde, minimalism etc etc. I bought them at the right time!
 
I’ve pretty much stopped buying music in the traditional form. With circa 3,000 CD’s and 4,000 LP’s, I probably won’t have chance to listen to what I’ve already got! For new stuff, I just stream it.
 
Vinyl plus streaming works very well for me. I only buy early pressings, Japanese pressings, or audiophile reissues (Tone Poet, MoFi etc, anyone who uses the original masters when the masters are still in good condition). Once I've started buying from a reissue series I compare with the best HiRes files on Qobuz to make sure I'm not just spending money on fancy packaging (I'm certainly not in the case of the Tone Poets, for instance). I do still buy CDs, but almost exclusively from improv/free jazz artists, and they are mostly unavailable on streaming services.
 
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