Organizing, Records and Discogs

When the pandemic started last March, much of the nation went into house-organizing mode, as people gathered never-worn clothes from bedroom closets and outgrown toys from playrooms, making room for other purchases that will one day need to be discarded.  The pandemic may have facilitated this organizing trend by forcing people to spend countless hours inside their homes, but I think a lot of it came down to control: giving us some semblance of power in a world that increasingly seemed to be careening towards a path of its own demise.  I think that’s what most organizing constitutes: a chance to regain control in an otherwise uncontrollable world.

While others were discarding, I was adding.  Just as the state of Illinois was shutting down last spring, I made regular trips to Home Depot to build three record racks for my growing collection of vinyl, and while the racks achieved their purpose of properly displaying my albums in all their glory, I soon wanted even more control.  I wanted them cataloged.

Enter Discogs.

Websites aimed to catalog aspects of our lives are nothing new.  Letterboxd tracks the movies we’ve seen (or haven’t seen yet), Goodreads does the same for books, Untappd for the beers you’ve sampled.  As someone who has made lists all his life, who when asked what my favorite movies are can immediately rattle off ten titles, I find these websites to be a Godsend, a way to transform scraps of paper or poorly organized spreadsheet files into fun, interactive activities that facilitate sharing content with others who relate to my obsessions.

There are plenty of options for music collector, but Discogs appears to be the site of choice for the folks I know.  It has its quirks and limitations, but after spending a week or so entering data, I’ve managed to inventory all of my records, CDs and concert DVDs nicely in the cloud and I’ve organized them even better on a spreadsheet that I can manipulate however I choose.

A few details.  If you’re a vinyl collector for whom its important to properly identify the specific pressing of each record you own – and there are reasons why this might be important – the endeavor of cataloging your collection is going to cost you loads of time.  For me, I was happy just to note that I owned a particular album and not that it was a particular reissue of a particular year.  This posed a problem, however, because Discogs attempts to estimate the monetary value of your collection – a nice feature – and to have this estimate somewhat accurate, it’s important for me to at least note that my 1974 Genesis release isn’t a first pressing, but a reissue.  And, truth be told, this is a pain to do on Discogs for several reasons:

1)     When searching for a basic record – say, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours – 538 versions of the album pop up, and even after filtering for country (U.S.) and format (vinyl) you’re left with over 90 options to choose from.  Which one do you choose without wanting to spend a great deal of time?  If you’re like me, knowing that I didn’t have a highly-valued first pressing – I chose the first reissue I could find.  But this leads to another problem…

2)     I want to be able to track my records based on the year they were released.  My mental timeline is part of what helps me navigate my world, and knowing that The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway came out in 1974 is one of those facts that anchors my historical timeline.  Unfortunately, if I want to properly recognize that I don’t own a valuable first pressing but rather an inexpensive reissue, it’s the year of the pressing that pops up when I chronologically order my collection, NOT the year the album was released.  I hate this.  Others hate it too, as a quick Google search confirmed, but while there are many likeminded people out there, there’s apparently only one solution to the problem:  download your collection, load it onto a spreadsheet, and physically change the dates to their original year of release.  That’s what I did.  Not ideal.

3)     Unless I’m missing something, I can’t set filtering defaults like searching only for vinyl releases in the U.S.  I have to tell Discogs to search only for “vinyl” and for “U.S. releases” every time search for a new record.  EVERY fricking time!  If I’m missing something, shame on me.  But this made entering data much more laborious.  And using the website is no better than the android app, as it takes a long time to even load the filtering page.  To date, there isn’t a Discogs app for PCs.  You have to go to the website if you want to make changes via your computer.  (I tried using “Disko for Discogs” which is supposed to be a way to use Discogs via an app, but this failed to even link up to my account).

These issues aside, Discogs is still a useful way to inventory of your collection, and if you own more recent CDs and albums, it’s easier still, as you can simply scan the barcode rather than typing in information (I entered my entire CD collection in less than a day).  Now that I’ve got everything entered and up to date, going forward when I purchase a new record, I’ll enter it separately onto Discogs and then onto the spreadsheet I’ve made to my preferred specifications.  Luckily for me, I only purchase 30 or 40 records a year, so this isn’t such a big deal.  If you’re a big collector with a lot of changes in inventory, this could be a major headache.   In addition to editing “year released” on my spreadsheet, I also manually edited the format of my items into basic categories (LPs, CDs and DVDs) and added a genre column (rock/pop, jazz, classical, spoken, humor).  This way I can sort my collection in any way I choose. (A question might be raised as to why I would feel compelled to sort my collection in multiple ways.  Again, it’s all about the illusion of control.)  The spreadsheet also serves as a way to enter albums that Disccogs can’t find – limited releases or self-released CDs that friends of mine have given to me over the years, for example. 

With everything entered, I’ve got upwards of 900 vinyl records and 500 CDs.  That’s a lot for sure, but each item is neatly arranged in the racks I built last spring, and as a result my mild obsession doesn’t seem like such a crazy endeavor.  When my records were stacked in boxes sprawled out on the basement floor, then I wondered if my collecting was getting out of hand.  Now if I ever feel this way, I need only look to a collecting friend of mine who’s amassed more than 5000 records.  Compared to him, my hobby seems downright sane.

Logging Films and Music

Early on in the film High Fidelity, the character Rob says, “…what really matters is what you like, not what you are like.”  I laughed out loud when I first heard this quote because for many of us there’s a grain of truth to it.  How many times has your opinion of someone shifted based on their collection of books, music or sports memorabilia?  Does someone’s comprehensive Bob Dylan collection impress you or turn you off?  Does a person’s room decked out in green and gold as a sort of shrine to the Green Bay Packers repulse you or enthrall you?  Have you ever started to fall in love with someone, only to learn that her favorite books are romance novels?  Or that his are comic books?  Or vice versa?  Sure, judging someone on what they like is shallow, but really, if you were to quickly sum up who I am to a stranger, you could do worse than providing him with a list of my top twenty books, movies and albums.

With this in mind, I was excited to learn about a couple of apps that help nutjobs like me log the art they consume.   I was even more excited after I learned that I’d be more-or-less housebound for three months during the pandemic.  Finding fun ways to kill time has been paramount.

Enter Letterboxd and Discogs.

At their most basic level, these apps allow you to log the films you’ve seen (Letterboxd) and what music you own (Discogs), and that’s essentially the level I’ve chosen to engage in.  If you really want to go down a rabbit hole, there are plenty of opportunities to do so, but for me just logging things was a lot of fun, as it helped me to remember that small 1988 movie starring Joe Mantegna and Don Ameche (Things Change) or that I shouldn’t buy a copy of Pretzel Logic, but rather it’s successor, Katy Lied.  Any app that helps jog my aging memory is a tool worth considering.

First, Letterboxd.  This couldn’t be easier to use, though I’ve found the desktop version superior to the phone app.  You can look up films by director, actor, year, decade, genre, title – you name it – and a click or two will allow you to choose “watched” “like” and “watchlist,” the latter a list of movies that you want to view.  You can also create lists of films, as my kids and I did when we chose the best twenty movies of the 2010s (note: the only film to make all four of our lists was Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World).  Rather than go through the trouble of reviewing or ranking the films I’ve seen, I chose to use the “like” button more as a “love” button.  I only included movies that truly resonated with me a significant way.  Case in point, this month I watched two movies that were both were very good, but only one really got to me.  Molly’s Game didn’t get checked as a “like,” but Doubt did.   As of today I’ve logged 1388 films watched, and I’ve “liked” 260 of them, some probably unwarrantedly so, others probably overlooked.  Love of art can be a finicky thing.

For Discogs, I avoided logging my records for a long time because I felt overwhelmed with the process. For example, when searching for Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, 308 different versions of the album appear, based on format, country, pressing, release date, etc.  It’s enough to make even a devoted logger give up.  I didn’t particularly care about what pressing I owned for each album – only that I owned some version of the album – and I didn’t want to work hard at this endeavor, pandemic or not.  To make things far easier and far more enjoyable, the only three categories I worried about were format (obviously), country and the unlikelihood that I owned an original pressing for most of my records.  When narrowing down the aforementioned Supertramp album using the above filters, I was left with a more manageable 33 versions to choose from, and I simply picked one at random.  Of course, if you’re a very serious collector who’s buying and selling, you may need to go the extra mile, and for that you have my sympathy.

I currently own 823 albums and I’ve compiled a list of another 122 that I’m actively looking for.  Discogs includes a rough estimate of your collection’s worth, averaging the last ten sales of each album you own.  What I’ve learned is this: record collecting is an enjoyable and relatively inexpensive hobby, and that all of my records wouldn’t pay for even two months of my son’s college education.  Oh well.

Of course, all of these records need to be stored somewhere, and this leads me nicely into next week’s blog post, about building functional and attractive record racks for your collection.  Stay tuned, and in the meantime, have some fun with Letterboxd and Discogs.