Vinyl and the collecting impulse and why some people have it and others don't is something I've tried to understand.

Vinyl collecting is not simply music fandom plus physical media. There's something specific about the collecting impulse that some music fans have and others don't, and it doesn't seem to be perfectly correlated with how much someone cares about music. Some of the most serious music listeners I know don't collect vinyl; some of the most obsessive collectors are less interested in the listening than in the owning.

The collecting impulse seems to be about the relationship to objects as carriers of meaning rather than just about the content. The vinyl collector is responding to something about the physical record — the artwork, the weight, the sense that the music is embedded in this specific physical object — that is separate from the musical content that the record contains.

I'm a collector in this sense. I care about the physical objects as much as the music, and I don't fully understand why. When I hold a record I love, I feel something that I don't feel when the same music plays from a digital file. The object carries the music differently.