Her dad, the 10k records he left behind and a viral lesson in grief
81 comments
·January 22, 2025gizajob
I’ve seen this girls posts a few times and something came up for me once. At the start I’m sure she said something like “I just spent a couple of weeks alphabetising my dad’s record collection” and I remember that stressed me out at the time. Alphabetisation is like something that a non-collector does when confronted with a collection. I’m a dad who collects vinyl and know that my shelves have formed themselves into sense, slowly over time, and that there is a deep ordering – formed by shifting one record at a time after playing it – based on my taste and likes and preferences. So I can’t critique but it did make me a little sad at the time that the first thing she did was to wipe out the order her dad had left it in, which probably looked like chaos to her. What’s done is done though, I just know that once she gets to the end she might realise that there was a sense and logic to how it had been left.
femto
When my Dad died, I was the one who "disassembled" his workshop. There was an order to it, which I grew up with, and that order deeply captured the way my father thought. It felt right to be pulling this personal thing apart. More like an act of saying goodbye rather than something destructive. I was probably the only one that knew the ordering, so I was remembering times in that workshop as I went, rather than just "cleaning up the mess". It also seemed right that the tools pass onto the next generation rather the order be preserved as a shrine.
xp84
I’m sorry for your loss. I’ve been building a fence this weekend, and thinking about my late Dad who taught me everything I know about building and fixing things.
I agree that your dad would have felt very satisfied that it was you who took care of those belongings.
femto
Thanks. Mainly I was posting to pass on the insight that I had at the time: that dealing with a death can be a process of transition rather than preservation.
gizajob
Yeah thanks for your comment. My thoughts about her weren’t a criticism - you’re totally right the records are now hers to start from scratch with. It was just a little niggle that came up for me that she missed something about the collection without even realising perhaps. But you could be correct to and she wanted a clean slate of it and to treat the music as hers and to discover it her way. It seems like she had a cool dad regardless, and he gave her a great gift even in his passing.
femto
And I hope my comment wasn't taken as a criticism of yours. There's no right answer here, just different valid points of view.
zemvpferreira
As a person who descends from a line of hoarders, you really should examine why your empathy went to the dead collector and his system instead of the girl who lost her father.
When my paternal granddad died, he left 39 000 books behind. I hope you can imagine the physical and emotional effort of unloading 40k books.
Maybe the daughter should appreciate all that lovely ordering nuance, or maybe not. For my money, large collections are expressions of a pathology and there is no duty to keep them pristine once their owners pass. In fact I think it’s quite rude to leave that burden to others. Your shit, your problem.
akudha
It all depends on the family, how close they are/were, their shared interests etc. Not sure we can pass generalized comments - what if my dad left me 40K books and he and I shared interest in books? It may not be rude for my dad then to leave me his collection.
On the other hand, if I am someone who hates to read, then yeah, even 40 books might be annoying much less 40K
zemvpferreira
Maybe I let my ranting get in the way of my main point: Objects and their order matter less than people and their problems. If you find yourself ranking things the opposite way, you should think that through.
No aggression meant towards the original commenter but in my experience as a son and grandson, that road can take you somewhere you don’t want to end up as a father.
Edit:I should add I’m just as pathological as the rest of my family. Instead of stuff I collect rules, and I have to be very careful to not impose those rules unconsciously on other people.
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bane
I know a guy who's grandfather died and left him the contents of his basement. After his grandfather passed, he drove several hours to the home and found a floor to ceiling collection of comic books going all the way back into the golden age of comics - thousands upon thousands of books.
He rented a moving truck, and put them all in some storage units closer to where he lived. It turns out he had also recently lost his job, and so with nothing else to do, and the impending need for some money, he started cataloging and selling them on eBay, bootstrapped his way into opening a small comic book business, then opened a larger store selling other things, which turned into a small chain of stores selling all kinds of hobby and collector stuff in the local area.
When I decided to offload my small childhood collection, he made me a generous offer for it which enabled me to make rent month. As he was looking through what I brought he told me this story, I asked what happened to the original collection. He said he now had a warehouse full of inventory of people's collections like mine, and that he just continued to move them via his stores, shows, and eBay. It had made him a steady living.
What you do with these things very much depends on you and an ability to find positivity in the situation. A literal library's worth of books is not an easy thing to handle for certain. I grew up in a family printing business so I have a pretty reasonable idea of how difficult it is to handle and store 40-50-60k books so I'm not without sympathy. But there is often value in these kinds of things.
zemvpferreira
I get you. There was actually a lot more monetary value than even you might presume. Many of the books were worth 30K+ at auction. But many others weren’t and they were all still a pain to cope with, plus all the other smaller collections we had to deal with. In any case, the broader point is that valuing a collection over people is always a bad idea.
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EncomLab
This may be the most vinylphillic response to someone's expression of grief ever written. "I get that she lost her dad, but what she should really feel bad about is re-ordering his record collection!"
gizajob
Haha honestly my point was a very minor one. Just my heart sank a little when her first video was a passing remark about alphabetising the collection, it made me think that there was probably an order in there already that she hadn’t even grokked. But they’re her records, and the music is the main thing that matters.
xp84
The only person who may have been able to make sense of the original order has passed on from this mortal coil and isn’t coming back either to assist in finding records, nor to be heartbroken or salty that she’d “ruined [his] filing system!”
And I do not think this is one of those things where if only she had spent six months studying it and doing a big wall full of pushpins, index cards, and post-its joined by yarn lines, suddenly it would all make sense and she’d inherit a magical musical truth.
EncomLab
So this is the second one - maybe her Dad matters?? Cripes man.
pseudolus
There's certainly some truth that the ordering of the records is important but in her defense it is mentioned she didn't inherit the collection intact but rather assembled it together as it had been distributed to friends and relatives of her father.
mellosouls
Alphabetisation is like something that a non-collector does when confronted with a collection.
Each to their own, it's certainly something I've done in the past as a (former) collector - the stress you felt may be more of a projection reaction, though your observations about meaning in the madness are valid.
dcminter
The novel High Fidelity has an opening scene with the protagonist deciding exactly how he's going to re-order his collection in a particular personal way.
SECProto
The movie does as well.
makizar
The article adresses this:
> Most of the vinyls were packed in boxes or held by relatives and friends before Jula slowly brought them all home
Seems like once she put the collection back together, the order was already lost.
Appart from that, I feel like there is some poetry to her slowly making it her own collection by listening to the records one by one. Kind of like a new like growing from within the records.
justin66
The value of that ordering scheme was lost when her father died, not when she reordered the records.
shermantanktop
I inherited 600+ jazz CDs and a couple of hundreds of LPs from my dad, who died 10 years ago - and like TFA, music is what we often connected over.
Most (but not all!) of that music is available online. But I listen to them now and then, in part for the linear experience that they offer, but also because they were his and meant a lot to him. And they were physical items - if he had left me his Spotify account, I'd get no value out of it.
Time to go put on some Grant Green..
lubujackson
My 8 year old so got a portable CD player fox Xmas. Now he is playing random CDs and has both control and serendipity when he wants to listen to some music. Physical media has so much value beyond the media on it!
sidewndr46
But how can we show him ads if he is just listening to CDs?
dingensundso
I hope the CD player is connected to the cloud so he can get important security updates for his CDs. Then there might be a way to add some personalized product recommendations between tracks...
HPsquared
Ads between the tracks, maybe a special format and an agreement with the CD player manufacturers that these can't be skipped or turned down.
thaumasiotes
Print them in the booklet.
0_____0
I think people assume that because the actual contents of the media are basically identical, that the physical and digital/streamed media are functionally equivalent, but they offer very different experiences.
You have a really awesome relationship with the physical media your dad left you. I imagine you play the vinyls on some kind of stereo and not in airpods or whatever? The medium asks you to use it to create an experience, an environment. Streaming doesn't care, so long as you're Consuming Content.
With the enshittification of Spotify (really? Ads for AI generated bullshit on my PAID account???) I really want to retreat back into the domain of Local Copy.
Sony BMG can't enshittify a CD you already own. Random House can't take back a book I bought in the 90s.
I hope that we have a renaissance of physical media as people realize that streaming companies don't respect our desires about how we listen/watch/read things.
lilhenry
You say that, but maybe you don’t remember the rootkits Sony BMG put on their cd’s in the 90’s ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo... ) Instead of playing you an ad, they disabled a function of your computer.
Loughla
There was a post on here that I responded to and can't find now. The purpose was a gentleman talking about how music today is generic crap because of streaming.
I disagreed with everything he said (he claims music is bland now because of streaming and just sort of ignores that for all of history most art produced is terrible) except the attraction of physical media. When you had to go through a process to be able to listen to media and you were stuck with it once you bought it, it was a real experience. The art, the feel, the smell of the record shop, hell you had to talk to actual people if you wanted to find new music that you would like. Everything was part of the experience.
And that is lost with streaming music.
s1artibartfast
Can't speak for the industry at large, but streaming ruined music for me. I think it has to do with how different brains are wired.
Organization on song within album within artist within genre helped me remember and relate to it. I felt like I was in conversation with the artists.
On the other hand, streaming is snippets without context, like a book composed of the most popular paragraphs from 1000s of authors.
I guess for me, being able engage with my personal library or playlists was irreplaceable.
jonhohle
I’m a big NIN fan and they have had great physical releases since the beginning - remix albums, singles, eps, vinyl, CD, SACD, DVD-A, blu-ray, etc., etc. each release has a halo, sigil, or null identifier designating its order.
Now there are releases that are digital only. It’s really odd. A huge part of the experience was the packaging and visual artwork and now that’s mostly gone.
netsharc
Somebody wrote that in the 1800s you'd probably hear a particular orchestral piece once in your life (and if you're a peasant probably never), having made arrangements to see a performance when they happen to be playing near you.
shermantanktop
> You have a really awesome relationship with the physical media your dad left you.
The relationship with the actual guy was significantly more complicated. CDs are a little easier to deal with than people.
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rendaw
You're also lumping buying mp3s/aac/whatever in with streaming. Sony can't mess with the DRM free audio files you purchase from any marketplace...
0_____0
Yeah there's a distinction. I think physical media, Local Copy (as I put it), and streaming are three different things.
waldothedog
> The medium asks you to use it to create an experience, an environment. Streaming doesn't care, so long as you're Consuming Content.
I think you’re being a bit too charitable with the record industry IMHO. Buying records is “Consuming Content”, the experience is of your own creation.
seba_dos1
Usually, you won't create anything of worth without consuming first.
shermantanktop
There is an artist on the other side. The fact that they can connect with you is the real experience, mediated by commerce and technology and all the other stuff that gets in the way.
scarface_74
You can rip music to digital in lossless format. There is no way that I would want to keep that much physical media. Back in the day, I had a 200 disc CD changer
brailsafe
In some sense, I'd love to be able to hang onto my dad's record collection, and bike collection, not so much his magazine collection, when he goes, but even though it's comparatively small, I know I'll have to pick a subset of favorites and find a way to get rid of the rest, and thankfully he's still got a few decades.
Collecting stuff feels like a remnant of gen x, but in my family probably comes from my dad's greatest gen parents, and the idea of having even a modest amount of extra storage space for my own crap (like an extra coat) is becoming more and more distant, at least in my city where it seems the current cost of living space is $1k/sq ft (CAD). I'd choose the location over the stuff any day, but it seems a bit silly how dramatically cost escalates, as in a hundred thousand more just to have some space for full-size sofa and a bedroom in some cases. Won't even get any land for that price, just imaginary land in the sky; for a townhouse or something I'd need to increase my hypothetical budget by $500k, which are some expensive records!
pjc50
Friend of mine commented that he could afford a grand piano now, but not the extra floor area of house which would be considerably more.
And this is having a real corrosive effect! When so much of the economy goes to rent, there's nothing left for buying consumer goods. Or starting businesses. People talk about not making things in the West due to high wages, but high property prices may be an even bigger effect.
brailsafe
Ya, both of those points have been crossing my mind a lot lately. To spme extent I'm sure a lot of people are spending that money on random trips or consumables since there's such a gulf between buying even a very high end sports car or live-in van and a basic home.
I also don't think there's much of a concept of buying a starter condo that's significantly discounted but could be fixed up. Sure, you can redo the walls maybe and the finishes, but if the building had serious structural problems you're screwed, asbestos you're screwed, bad roof, no plumbing accomodation for in-suite laundry etc etc
mb7733
> at least in my city where it seems the current cost of living space is $1k/sq ft (CAD).
Even in Canada I don't think rent is this high :) ... Curious what you meant, or was this just hyperbole?
brailsafe
Ya I was just kind of ruminating on future prospects and should have specified to buy, but no part was hyperbole. Translated to rent (which is apparently decreasing slightly as of late) it works out to about $3-5/sq ft per month, or like $1700-2200 for a studio and $2.7k-3500 for a 2 bed, probably looking at upwards of $4k for anything with land, all depending on factors much like buying. In smaller isolated cities, and far flung suburbs, it's less but not by as much as you'd think, they're all catching up.
It feels insane that in our next place, we'll likely be spending around $24k a year for a space with no bedroom, probably in someone's basement again, which is around what my dad currently earns after taxes, but it's a bit up to luck. I almost don't want to think about it, so much anxiety.
Sad state of things really, along with the economy. Unless you already make great money, inherented it, locked something in ages ago, or just prefer to live in the deep boonies, you're kind of screwed.
mb7733
Ah I see, I was only thinking of rent, not purchase price.
agotterer
This a neat project and an impressive collection. I’m curious, if shes hosting streaming listening party shows is she obligated to pay royalties?
jakedata
I had some music playing in the background while testing a Youtube livestream for the first time. Nobody was connected, I was working on camera settings. Google shut it down within a few minutes and bitched at me about a copyright violation. That was the last time I used Youtube.
jolmg
> That was the last time I used Youtube.
Problem's bigger than Youtube.
BlueTemplar
Yes, the main issue is platforms : avoid them :
https://framablog.org/2023/12/26/give-the-gift-of-free-softw...
jabroni_salad
Instagram has a deal with the record industry. How the renumeration works isn't disclosed but instagram users are allowed to use copyrighted songs as long as they dont use the entire song and the main purpose of the video is to be a video (as opposed to a video that is just a song).
pjc50
You need to be careful with these; the rules platforms seem to have settled on is that livestreaming is sort of OK but anything which may be archived or replayed isn't. So you get "DJ" and "karaoke" livestreams, but only live.
During lockdown there were things like https://timstwitterlisteningparty.com/ , where the audience comments along but is all synchronously listening to their own copy. I'm still in a group which does this weekly with films.
miunau
The platform or the venue pays a more or less flat fee to one or more local copyright associations for music to be played. If you host it yourself, you can get flat-rate streaming licenses (ie. non-seeking linear programming only) for not a lot of money- from a few dozen to some hundreds a year $ depending on location. The DJs should send set lists to their copyright association so that they can remit to the correct people. On e.g. Twitch, the platform should technically handle everything for you via content ID, but they can't catch everything. In any case, the DJ doesn't pay unless they own the performing or broadcasting venue. Streaming service rules on what is allowed also vary depending on the agreements they have set up with the associations.
poirori
> In a noisy era of streaming libraries, trendy headphones and smart shuffles, music listening and discovery have become solitary practices.
Shameless plug: this is why I created digs.fm. I missed the days where you would just sit there with an album, and take it all in. And then you would go on to tell your friends about it.
https://archive.ph/5sJTY