As someone who's always loved collecting things, I'm conditioned in a way where I find the limited pressing bandcamp madness emotionally exhausting... "Do I need this? Will I be sad when I later decide this is my favorite album of the year/decade and I'll have missed out on getting the LTD to 300 pressing AKA the 'ultimate version' for any true fan?" Pretty pathetic to have feelings like that but it's just the marketing tactics doing the psychological manipulation they're designed to do. I'm only human. Luckily I'm also pretty cheap so that side of me has balanced things out. I've seen people drop boatloads of money on all sorts of physical collector hobbies totally impulsively and without much anguish. Completist mindset being the most extreme. Anyway, having been swept up in it various times I've both been lucky and also have overpaid in the long run. It used to be about finding holy grails for cheap in random bins at the record/thrift shop. Nowadays everyone now knows exactly what they have and prices always reflect median discogs or more. Miracle deals are literally that, more and more. Seems every single artist and label plays the limited pressing piranha bait game with some variation of the physical product, and that manufactured rarity has effectively replaced the grail dig deal hunting. The whole industry has adopted the RSD strategy as the norm.
― Evan, Tuesday, 23 February 2021 16:05 (three years ago) link