The world's largest record collection is valued at over $50 million and the owner, Paul Mawhinney, is trying to sell it, but no one will make a serious offer near the current $3 million price tag. The collection houses over 3 million records and 300,000 CDs.

You have to watch the incredibly sad and well done docu-short below the cut to fully understand what's going down.


The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

A quick jaunt around eBay for records confirms further that analog is slipping away and no one cares. We're setting ourselves up for a huge cultural bottoming out if we continue to go virtual with everything and while people may not understand the importance that this collection represents now, it will become apparent in 30 years when none of our cds work and all of the mp3s we bought have been lost to dead drives and DRM.

It's like people throwing out the Roman statues because the Greek copies are newer and appear to be sturdier or burning books because everything's up on Wikibookia or Google Books (see news item from the year 2021.) What are we going to do when the sun explodes and all computers are destroyed leaving only analog music to be enjoyed? Bust out the reel-to-reel?

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