Personally, I don't really give a shit about all that. I collected records for the last 10 years, but I was never really any kind of vinyl purist. I liked buy the vinyl of an album over the CD when I could find it, and all the while i've had huge mp3 collections, tapes, cd-rs, reel to reels ect. I've sold a lot of my record and CD collection in the last year since I've been super broke, but honestly I don't really regret it. I don't really give a fuck about a piece of plastic, I LOVE MUSIC. I really don't associate times in my life with LPs, but the actual audio on them. A song or album could remind me of a certain time in my life, and could have only heard the mp3s. I feel like many of the records that changed my life in my teenage years will also always be available (at least in my lifetime) in some form for me to hear, so when I sold albums I loved, I told myself that and everything was OK, and that eating was more important than owning a shitty re-issue of White Light White Heat. Also, while I certainly used to live record stores, I get the same gleam in my eyes when I find huge folders of weird mp3s to dig through, or someone gives me a hard drive to dig through, as I did when I walked into a record store at age 16. If any excitement has been lost, it's not the record stores fault, it's because I'm not hearing Throbbing Gristle or Can for the first time. Then again, finding things on fucking Youtube have given me similar chills down my spine.
On the DJ side of things, I respect people who play all vinyl, and when I went to a soul night not long ago and the DJ was using Serato, I thought it was pretty fucking lame. Not to say it was much of a serious soul night (obviously), but to me, that's really lame. Much of the music I play never came out on vinyl, or never even came out at all. I dig very deep digitally (as well as trade a lot), and a lot of the tracks I play aren't even from Beatport, or even illegal copies of stuff from Beatport. There is still an art to the hunt, whether your in a smelly record store with dickhead clerks, or your just finding weird kids on social network sites. Maybe this isn't as respectable, but I can't say I really give a shit. While technology makes it so "anybody can be a DJ" nowadays, if you download your entire set in an hour, your probably not going to have a very interesting set. The skill of sifting through all the bullshit is obviously a very important skill these days.
All this said the culture is different in the US than it is in the UK though, in the last 10 years or so that is (or well, when Serato started popping off at least). There wasn't as strong of a white label/dubplate culture in the 2000s out here as there was in London, at least with, dare I say "forward thinking music" or whatever the hell you want to call it. Also today, there definitely aren't that many US labels putting out vinyl (at least not anything good IMO), so it's kinda rare to find a DJ playing all vinyl these days.
On the DJ side of things, I respect people who play all vinyl, and when I went to a soul night not long ago and the DJ was using Serato, I thought it was pretty fucking lame. Not to say it was much of a serious soul night (obviously), but to me, that's really lame. Much of the music I play never came out on vinyl, or never even came out at all. I dig very deep digitally (as well as trade a lot), and a lot of the tracks I play aren't even from Beatport, or even illegal copies of stuff from Beatport. There is still an art to the hunt, whether your in a smelly record store with dickhead clerks, or your just finding weird kids on social network sites. Maybe this isn't as respectable, but I can't say I really give a shit. While technology makes it so "anybody can be a DJ" nowadays, if you download your entire set in an hour, your probably not going to have a very interesting set. The skill of sifting through all the bullshit is obviously a very important skill these days.
All this said the culture is different in the US than it is in the UK though, in the last 10 years or so that is (or well, when Serato started popping off at least). There wasn't as strong of a white label/dubplate culture in the 2000s out here as there was in London, at least with, dare I say "forward thinking music" or whatever the hell you want to call it. Also today, there definitely aren't that many US labels putting out vinyl (at least not anything good IMO), so it's kinda rare to find a DJ playing all vinyl these days.
