This Guy in Brazil owns all the records

[AlexH.]

A lot of what he's buying is music from impoverished/third world countries, where large record collections can look like this:

 

 

Most of that music only exists on vinyl, too, no tape backup or CD reissues like even obscure American/European music is afforded. He's cleaning, cataloging, and storing them with the long term in mind, and he knows what he's doing. The picture is clearly staged: yes, he's standing on a bunch of spread out dollar bin shit - on top of a shrink-wrapped pallet of efficiently stacked boxes full of vertically stored records. I've seen worse.

 

My main beef with this guy's mission is that not all music is worth saving. If I were foreman of this project, objective one would be to off-load all duplicates and in-print titles, and objective two would be to destroy & recycle all easy-listening, Readers Digest compilations, and Barbra Streisand. They'd be better off as patio furniture or insulation than as records. It's easy to romanticize the preservation of the past to the point where we get instinctually upset when completely worthless things are thrown out or wasted. I hope that future generations don't waste resources on saving trashy paranormal teen romance books or CDs by those guys at the mall kiosks playing reed flutes over MIDI tracks.

 

Brazil guy is facing a larger version of what most of Western society is facing post-Internet: we have a glut of information at our fingertips, but we are not yet fully equipped to know how to turn it into something useful. This guy's strategy is to figure that part out later; he's got the money, and if he hires some more people maybe he'll make a dent in cataloging the history of recorded music. So even if this guy's eyes are larger than his stomach, I gotta admire his gumption.