Recently, a study made the Hacker News’ front page mentioning that 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don’t own a record player. There was ample discussion on whether it was GenZ collecting aesthetic objects or a fashion statement.
They are not wrong, but I wanted to share why I bought a vinyl without a record player.
I own four vinyl records. I’ve never played a single one in my house, and I’m not planning to buy a record player.
Discovering Nujabes
When I started coding, I discovered that one of the things that helped me concentrate the most was non-verbal, repetitive and creative music. Enough for it not to be “boring” but also not to be “distracting”. That’s when, playing some songs and following the recommendation algorithm, I ran into Nujabes.
Jun Seba, better known as Nujabes (his name backwards), was a Japanese producer who I consider to have created the lo-fi hip-hop jazz genre (I might be wrong, but let me live with my dreams). He spent his too-short life blending jazz samples, soul, and hip-hop into something that felt both nostalgic and completely new. His music was perfect for coding.
The Day the Music Disappeared
One day, mid-coding session, I turn to my favorite Nujabes playlist to start blasting away, when suddenly, I couldn’t find his music anywhere.
It was gone.
Gone as in… it wasn’t in YouTube, it wasn’t in Spotify, it wasn’t anywhere.
The label, Victor Entertainment, had decided to pull it from the US. Not nefariously, but just because some contract somewhere finished or changed.
The Desperate Email
That’s when desperation took over. I went and sent an email out to the publisher “Victor Entertainment,” finding their contact info from their Japanese-only website.
I reached out and wrote them the following email:
January 22nd, 2022
I’m looking for Nujabes/Fat Jon/Force of Nature - Impression Samurai Champion CD, I can’t seem to play it in spotify anymore. Is there a way to buy it? It’s my favorite album. Warm regards from Seattle.
Nujabes/Fat Jon/Force of Nature - Impression Samurai Champion の CD を探していますが、もう Spotify で再生できないようです。 購入する方法はありますか？ 大好きなアルバムです。 シアトルからよろしくお願いします。
That’s when I got the following reply:
Daniel Sada 様
Thank you very much for your continued patronage of our products. This is the Victor Entertainment Customer Service Office.
「Samurai Champloo Music Record Impression」につきまして、 The manufacturer is currently out of stock and there are no plans to reproduce it at the moment.
I don’t know if it will meet your wishes, but please report your request to the person in charge. I will use it as a reference for future production.
Thank you very much for your valuable opinions.
If you have any questions in the future, please feel free to contact us. Thank you for your continued patronage of our products.
About a year later, Nujabes quietly returned to US streaming platforms. But I wasn’t going to sit around just waiting for my music to exist.
Archival Methods
Many people seem surprised when I tell them that USB and CDs are not long-term archival methods (or maybe they are with proper care?). There are some archival-grade CDs and DVDs, M-Discs, and other things.
I learned this the hard way as a kid. I’ve lived through so many of my games getting scratched and unplayable when I was a kid on the PS1. Getting scratches meant losing entire levels of fun.
CDs, in non-ideal conditions (which is most conditions), last 5-10 years. Even in perfect, climate-controlled storage, with special archival CDs, the most optimistic estimates are 30-50 years. USB drives and SD cards? They can fail silently, with no warning. I’ve had drives corrupt after sitting in a drawer for two years.
And streaming? As I’d just learned, streaming is a license that can be revoked at any moment. You don’t own the music. You rent access to it, and the landlord can change the locks whenever they want.
Re-getting My Music
After the Nujabes scare, I went on eBay and bought his entire discography on vinyl. Not CDs (every CD listing I found mentioned “light scratches” or “minor wear,” and I’d learned not to trust that). But vinyl? Vinyl is different.
I bought vinyl because it’s durable. A scratch on a CD can make it unplayable. A scratch on vinyl might cause a tiny pop, but the music keeps playing. Vinyl degradation is gradual and predictable, not catastrophic and random.
A friend with a proper turntable setup helped me digitize all four records. He spent an afternoon carefully recording each track, preserving them as high-quality FLAC files. Those files live on multiple hard drives, in multiple locations (two in different physical locations + one in the cloud).
Insurance Against Ephemerality
The vinyls now sit on my shelf. I look at them sometimes as an artifact of the ephemeral nature of our rent-to-exist society.
Do I plan to buy a record player? Not really.
But I own the vinyls because they are a durable, physical backup of what I treasure. For when some corporation decides it’s not profitable to have Nujabes in their streaming roster.
I call them insurance.
Permanence for these records is really nice. Not in the sense that they last forever, but in the sense that their degradation is in my control. I’m willing to bet they will outlast all my USBs, CDs, and other media.