Why an old vinyl collection is worth keeping

What this lesson teaches

A very short video making a single point, and it is sharper than its length suggests.

What is actually scarce

Go back thirty years. You could buy a commercial hit on vinyl and so could everyone else. That record is on the streaming services now, so owning the original confers little on you as a DJ. Anyone can play it tonight.

But a limited-run techno or house 12-inch from the same period is a different object. It was pressed in small numbers, most copies are gone, and a large proportion of that music was never digitised and never will be - the rights are tangled, the labels are defunct, and there is no commercial reason for anyone to do the work.

So if you own a crate of those, you can play a set that nobody else can play. Not a set that is better by taste, but one that is literally unavailable to a DJ working from a download store.

Why this is worth more than it sounds

Almost every advantage in DJing can be bought. Better equipment, better software, better headphones, lessons. A record collection cannot, because what made it is twenty years of being in the right shops and deciding what to carry home.

That is the one asset a newer DJ cannot acquire by spending more, and it is why a promoter looking for something that is not interchangeable will take a call from somebody with a crate.

Two honest qualifications

Scarce is not the same as good. A record nobody else has may be one nobody else wanted, and "you will not have heard this" is not by itself a reason for a floor to stay.

And the value is in the set, not the object. Some individual records are worth real money to collectors, but that is a different business. His point is about what you can do on a Saturday night, not what you can sell.

Which is why his instruction is simply: look after it.