What was initially conceived of as something of a Wikipedia for recorded music — although, founded in 2000 by Intel programmer Kevin Lewandowski, it predates the encyclopedia site by a few months — hasn’t changed a great deal since its conception, besides the introduction of the marketplace in the mid-aughts.
Discogs is a fairly clunky, definitely old-fashioned website devoted to even older technology: a vestige of an earlier, more idyllic internet that has spent the last decade walking the record-needle-thin line between 2020s algorithmically driven tech monolith and niche unprofitable obscurity.
“I’ve made my living with this company for the past decade,” says a Connecticut seller who also does the majority of his business on Discogs and requested anonymity for the same reasons.
Underlying the sellers’ complaints is a kind of dismay, the feeling that what had previously been a safe haven for nerds to buy and sell $2 records is being threatened — that one more corner of the internet that wasn’t yet a glossy behemoth designed to subsume and capitalize on your personal information was about to collapse.
The tension between Discogs’ old-internet charm and its attempts at growth came to a head earlier this summer around a since-deleted viral Twitter thread by artist and label head Mike Simonetti lamenting “the fall of discogs.” Simonetti sounded the alarm about increasing fees and subsequently increasing prices, a growing influx of scammers, rising shipping costs, and the dysfunction of the website itself, among other issues.
Discogs, hopefully, will not become the latest in a long line of formerly useful sites; for the moment, though, sellers feel alienated by the small company they once viewed as an ally in an optimistic mission to share knowledge about music.
The original article contains 2,361 words, the summary contains 286 words. Saved 88%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
What was initially conceived of as something of a Wikipedia for recorded music — although, founded in 2000 by Intel programmer Kevin Lewandowski, it predates the encyclopedia site by a few months — hasn’t changed a great deal since its conception, besides the introduction of the marketplace in the mid-aughts.
Discogs is a fairly clunky, definitely old-fashioned website devoted to even older technology: a vestige of an earlier, more idyllic internet that has spent the last decade walking the record-needle-thin line between 2020s algorithmically driven tech monolith and niche unprofitable obscurity.
“I’ve made my living with this company for the past decade,” says a Connecticut seller who also does the majority of his business on Discogs and requested anonymity for the same reasons.
Underlying the sellers’ complaints is a kind of dismay, the feeling that what had previously been a safe haven for nerds to buy and sell $2 records is being threatened — that one more corner of the internet that wasn’t yet a glossy behemoth designed to subsume and capitalize on your personal information was about to collapse.
The tension between Discogs’ old-internet charm and its attempts at growth came to a head earlier this summer around a since-deleted viral Twitter thread by artist and label head Mike Simonetti lamenting “the fall of discogs.” Simonetti sounded the alarm about increasing fees and subsequently increasing prices, a growing influx of scammers, rising shipping costs, and the dysfunction of the website itself, among other issues.
Discogs, hopefully, will not become the latest in a long line of formerly useful sites; for the moment, though, sellers feel alienated by the small company they once viewed as an ally in an optimistic mission to share knowledge about music.
The original article contains 2,361 words, the summary contains 286 words. Saved 88%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!