The Vinyl Frontier

February 19, 2016 12:40 PM

Brazilian businessman Zero Freitas owns over six million records, a collection which he intends to catalogue for public use and transform into a vast listenable archive. Writer and cultural sociologist Dominik Bartmanski visited Freitas’ São Paulo warehouse for a rare interview with the man himself.
posted by Rumple (10 comments total)

U.S. Americans have the cult of memory. So the estimation is that the percentage of digitalised music reaches the level of 80% of all works ever released there. In a country like Brazil, it does not reach 20%. I’d say it’s probably even less because this is just 20% of the mainstream commercial market and outside it it must be close to zero.

Wow. This is, like, musicide.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 12:59 PM on February 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

As Freitas says, trying to get all the twelve-inch-records ever produced in Brazil is extremely pretentious. Since his love for the musical traditions of his home country seems as bottomless as its sonic richness, he nevertheless accepted the challenge and began to curate his collecting more strictly, prioritising Brazilian works, increasingly the ones from northern regions of the vast country. The challenge is compounded by the fact that Brazilian stores have been raided for decades by collectors from Japan and Europe who followed the Bossa Nova craze.

That sucks.

Over time Freitas has found roughly 100,000 records in Cuba, including some obscure pre-1989 stuff from Eastern Europe that ended up there due to the former political connections. He finds Cuban music remarkable and estimates that his Cuban collection is now close to all works released there on vinyl.

:/
posted by Foci for Analysis at 1:04 PM on February 19, 2016

I figured there had to be a Previously. There is - the 2014 NY Times article. Previously.

See also Previously: Not as massive as Zero Freitas collection

Good to hear that he is curating and cataloging, not just hoarding, which seemed to be an implication of previous reports.
posted by larrybob at 1:04 PM on February 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wow. This is, like, musicide.

On one hand, I love having nigh instant access to decades of music from much of the world. On the other hand, have you ever seen a cheerful elephant? (that's a story about copyright, but the idea of forgetting and rediscovering music is interesting and related here).
posted by filthy light thief at 1:24 PM on February 19, 2016 [3 favorites]

I've got somewhere near 2200 CD's and even that provides "what should I listen to?" anxiety.
posted by davebush at 1:56 PM on February 19, 2016

This picture of him standing on pallets of records makes me sad. I have kept my records vertical for decades, out of sunlight, etc..

I don't hold much hope that his entire collection will not be destroyed by a flood, fire or some other natural disaster...or, more likely, just neglect.

IMO, he is doing a disservice to music, it makes me sad to see it. I have no envy of him at all...rather the opposite.
posted by Chuffy at 2:52 PM on February 19, 2016

Anyone got contact on this guy? I'd like to send him a link to my Instagram. I'm sure I've got stuff he needs.
posted by You Should See the Other Guy at 3:05 PM on February 19, 2016

Brief derail: when I was in middle school, I wrote a record review column for my school newspaper called The Vinyl Frontier. The title of this post made me do a double take.
posted by pxe2000 at 6:17 AM on February 20, 2016 [1 favorite]

So to actually listen to all those records would take about 500 years if you were playing them non-stop. 6000000 x 45 mins / 60 mins / 24 hours / 365 days = 513 years

At what point is this desire to catalogue all artistic endeavours to be forsaken? How many albums are already on Spotify? There is truly a glut of content and although I can kinda identify with the hoarding attitude, at some point you just have to start throwing stuff away.

Perhaps he should just melt them into a giant ball of plastic and roll it across the country? Would it be comparably absurd as the attempt to "make available" all this content.

Its odd that the articles about this guy seldom mention the practical impossibility of legally "making it available" in the current global copyright framework. Is he going to digitize it all and put it on a big russian server?
posted by mary8nne at 8:54 AM on February 20, 2016

Oh wait he isn't even bothering to digitize it! - he wants to start a "lending library" - it gets more and more absurd.

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/mar/27/record-collector-zero-freitas-worlds-largest-vinyl-hoard
posted by mary8nne at 8:59 AM on February 20, 2016 [1 favorite]