I guess you could say that I am somewhat late to the party with this post, given that all those annoying Spotify Wrapped posts were flooding social media late last year. I don’t use Spotify, having a) a roll-your-own version in the form of Plex and b) many, many vinyl records.
How many?!
I thought that it would be interesting to take a look at just how many records I had and how my collection had changed over a year – so I wrote a web page to show me just that. And I somewhat wished I hadn’t!
You can see the results (or the problem) in the video below:
There is something about physical music that you just cannot get with streaming, and this is particularly true with 12″ vinyl LPs, where not only can you hold the music in your hands, but you can also see the (sometimes) glorious artwork in great detail. I am particularly partial to the work of Hipgnosis who designed the covers for many of my favourite albums.
I have to say that part of my problem is that while I might not consider myself such, I am a collector and a completist and sometimes find myself buying an album to fill a hole in that particular artist’s oeuvre. It might then make for a complete collection, but doesn’t mean that it gets played. I should be more discerning, but that can be hard to do given a mindset built up over years.
Ok, this is turning into something of a therepy session now so maybe I should stop now. Hang on wait a minute, they’ve just released the Record Store Day list and that looks interesting and might fill a hole!
How does it work?
Are you interested in how this works or maybe running it for yourself? In which case head over to my technology blog where I run through how I got access to the information needed to display the stats and you can also find out how to download and install the code from there too.