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Actually, a collection of records is in a rather enviable position - at least records don't degrade over time the way other media (magnetic tape, floppies, not

• AmericanChopper 3y ago
  You’re right, but they degrade in a different way. Presuming you don’t abnormally damage it in some way, you’d only expect to get a few hundred plays out of a record before it starts to noticeably degrade. By 1000 plays you’d expect it to be very noticeably degraded.
  • rufus_foreman 3y ago
    I have LPs that have locked grooves at the end of the songs where they keep playing the same loop until you manually stop them. At 33 1/3 RPM, they would hit 1000 plays after 30 minutes, they don't noticeably degrade in that period of time. A friend said he would leave records like that playing for weeks on the same locked groove and that they did eventually wear out. A week would be 7 * 24 * 60 * 33.33 so 336,000 plays.
• notahacker 3y ago
  It also has the advantage that records have a substantial niche amongst music aficionados and collectors as a desirable music and cover art format. Even obscure records in genres few people care about have some chance of surviving outside archives. (Someone posted about the last DVD rental place in London recently, and my first thought was of all the stores selling vinyl that outlasted it) In this case it's clear the records are no longer in any danger of being thrown away (and were never in danger of being wiped and recorded over like other storage media), and what the collector and his celebrity backers are really looking for is a suitably "special" venue to showcase them