We are in the midst of an era marked by striking changes in the way music is created, produced, distributed, regulated, and of course, consumed. The iPod revolution has made flipping a record over every twenty minutes positively archaic. Ironically, the diverse record collections that took years of dedicated digging to accumulate can now be easily and quickly accessed via peer-to-peer networks. Rather than lamenting the death of the record-collecting industry as we knew it, this newfound access has liberated more and more recordings that might have sat idly in the back corners of record collections. Although it may seem like everything is available all the time, it takes the tireless work of labels such as the Numero Group to fill in the gaps. read more »

When discussing record hunting in an article about beatdigging in Life Sucks Die, Mr. Supreme said, “I’m like a magnet to breaks! I can just pick up any record and it will have a beat.” Because of the many ways to employ samples, I have heard other producers express similar sentiments. I identify with this uncanny serendipity although not necessarily with records. read more »