Further reading

Giles, D. C., Pietrzykowski, S., and Clark, K. E. (2007). The psychological meaning of personal record collections and the impact of changing technological forms. Journal of Economic Psychology, 28(4), 429–443. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2006.08.002

Recent neuropsychological evidence suggests that the more unusual collecting behaviour may result from the failure of cognitive planning and organisation (Anderson, Damasio, & Damasio, 2005).

One of the important psychological functions of material possessions is their differentiating power (Csikzentmihalyi & Rochberg-Halton, 1981). They serve simultaneously as a measure of uniqueness and of conformity. In relation to music collections, it is unlikely that any two people in any society would share an identical collection of recordings unless they habitually purchase music as a social unit, such as a cohabiting couple, for instance, who have amalgamated their individual collections.

Most of the iPod owners in our sample were keen collectors of CDs as well. Indeed there were frequent comments about the distinction between the two formats: typically, digital downloads were used to explore new music, often friends’ recommendations, but consumers still felt a need to purchase particular favourites on CD.

What is needed now is data that explores nascent trends among middle teenagers whose first purchase of recorded music is an MP3, and who associate material recordings with older generations. It is possible, after all, that developmental factors are the key to this distinction. From a utility perspective, it is perhaps more important for young people to have music ‘on the move’, in constant circulation with friends, than for adults in settled domesticity.

Kushner, S. (2019). Collecting and media change, or: Listening to Phish via app. Convergence, 26(4), 969–989. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856519838741

Practices of collecting also tell stories about tastefulness and narrate relationships with things, in order to construct a ‘narrative of identity, history, and situation’ (Bal, 1994: 101). Collections become collections when there is a narrative: a beginning, a middle, and at least the prospect of an ending. ‘One object’, writes Bal (1994: 101), must have been the first to be acquired, but then, when it was first it was not being collected – merely purchased, given or found, and kept because it was especially gratifying. [ ...] Collecting comes to mean collecting precisely when a series of haphazard purchases or gifts suddenly becomes a meaningful sequence.

What Hoy describes here is the set of curatorial practices that are implicated in collecting, but which are absent from the streaming platforms. In his efforts to build The Spreadsheet, Hoy ‘actively, selectively, and passionately acquir[ed]’ (Belk, 1995: 67) what he perceived to be the most desirable recording of each show represented in the known history of Phish. He then stored each recording in a file locker and displayed the set in a virtual cabinet of popular music curiosities, a cloud-based spreadsheet that others could browse.

The trophy-case tape racks that lined the 1990s Phish fan’s dorm room are now gone, a statement from a former life, and the limited-edition posters have materialized to satisfy that unmet collecting desire. Widespread middle-class collecting emerged in response to changing economic conditions in the 19th century. Similarly, in the 21st century, the rise of streaming audio has provoked a shift in what Phish fans collect and how they collect it – and today, Phish wants a cut.