Collecting and The Cloud

I’ll inch out on a limb here and say that most audiophiles are also collectors of recordings.

- Robert Baird

How people collect recordings is an endless fascination of mine—I ask friends, acquaintances, interview subjects, and even students in a music class that I teach. The sum of their answers makes me something of an expert on the ways in which people consume music.

There are, I grant you, a certain number of audiophiles, gearheads— whatever you want to call them—who really do collect only gear. Swapping out new speakers every year or so is an expensive hobby, but if you have the means, then to each his own. Stereophile’s late contributing editor Wes Phillips called them geekazoids. For the geekazoid, music is only a means of testing the gear. He’s interested only in brushed-metal boxes and little red and blue lights. He keeps a couple of Deutsche Grammophon Beethoven symphony cycles or John Coltrane Atlantic albums on hand, but only to impress friends.