The internet has ruined a great many things. Mail-order catalogs, adult movie theaters, winning arguments by making things up that sound true but can easily be verified, the list goes on. There are also many, many thousands of little things that were lost as our access to the internet becomes simpler and simpler. One of them is collecting, where sites like Ebay, Discogs, and Etsy have changed what the hobby is about.
Now you might argue that collecting became a whole lot easier with the internet and yes, the internet has made collecting easier, but it certainly has not made it better. Gone is the thrill of the hunt for that elusive Pokémon card, record, or special edition action figure. Your stamp collection can now be completed so long as you have sufficient funds to cover processing and shipping fees. In a way, there is no such thing as a rare collectible in the information age.
This shift in collecting has caused more than just a loss of satisfaction. Every collector’s market has been oversaturated with people trying to make a quick buck reselling popular items, creating fakes, or outright scamming people looking for that coveted missing piece of their collection.
If we’re talking about record collecting, the biggest culprit of this change in how we collect is Discogs. Love it or hate it, Discogs is the number one place for records on the internet. Information about records, buying, selling, and figuring out the value of your records, all happen almost exclusively through dDscogs. The rarer the record, the more likely that ordering it through Discogs for an exorbitant price from someone in Denmark will be your only option.
If you see hunting down specific records as more of a chore than a hobby in itself, Discogs is great. If you have the money, you can have any record you want and have a collection that is cooler than all your friends. You don’t have to wait in line on Record Store Day, you don’t have to get up early Saturday morning to flip through the new arrivals bin at your local shop, and you don’t have to set alarms to pre-order a record that will sell out in mere minutes.
But what record do you value more: The one you got online for $150 or the one you sought out for years before finally finding it buried at a record store on the day you least expected to find it?
Full disclosure: I have bought plenty of albums on Discogs. There are some records that I simply have no hope of ever finding in a record store where I live, and if it’s an album I love enough, I will bite the bullet to own a physical copy of it. Look at one of my favorite country albums of all time, Sleep Beneath the Willow by Daniel Romano is a unicorn in the U.S. The album never even got a U.S. pressing, and for some reason most of the Canadian pressings have ended up in Europe. I go to a lot of record stores, I have a whole website about it, and I have 0 hope of ever seeing that on a shelf anywhere.
So what am I to do?
There are a lot of people out there who buy records exclusively from Discogs. There are also plenty of people who despise Discogs and view the site as some sort of boogeyman that represents everything wrong with vinyl and what record collecting has become during its revival over the last 10 years. I am neither of these people. Discogs has made this hobby more accessible to tons of people who aren’t as lucky as I am to have access to incredible record stores. But it’s also contributed to the inflation of prices and other not-so-great industry practices like releasing numerous variants of the same record and unnecessary repressings.
The temptation to buy every record you could ever want through Discogs can be hard to ignore. But I think in the long run it sucks all the fun and magic out of collecting. It’s like winning a game because you used a cheat code. Sure, there is satisfaction about completing it, but you’ll soon realize it was always more about the journey than any reward at the end.