Record Collecting

The hobby of collecting sound recordings, most often of music but sometimes poetry, speeches or ambient noise, with vinyl the classic format though collectors also pursue 78 rpm shellac discs, 45s, compact discs and other formats. The hobby grew alongside recorded sound itself, moving from a luxury item into ordinary homes as manufacturing costs fell through the 1920s, and different eras drove different specialties: rare pre-war jazz and blues 78s in the 1940s, archival folk and blues shellac discs during the 1960s folk revival, and hip-hop producers searching record bins in a practice called crate digging to find sounds to sample. A vinyl revival beginning around 2011 has kept the hobby active even as digital listening dominates ordinary music consumption, and publications such as Goldmine and Record Collector established standardized grading and pricing for collectors trading among themselves.