On holiday this summer I found a still-sealed secondhand vinyl copy of the third album by The Streets, The Hardest Way To Make an Easy Living. I bought it in the end but took my time getting to the checkout. I wasn’t particularly flush and had spent a lot of money just being on holiday. I definitely didn’t need to buy this record, not just because I remember it being patchy as hell1, but because I could remind myself of how patchy for free online. Stood in the record store, I took a moment to have a word with myself: if I wasn’t going to buy a pristine rarity that had sentimental value to me what did an album need to be for me – a person hyper aware of the support needed by independent music culture (in this case Austin’s Waterloo Records rather than Mike Skinner) – to ever pay for music again? So I bought it and have listened to it a bunch since, which I wouldn’t have done if I’d left the shop $20 up but without the album.
It got me wondering how others justify spending money on music in an age when you don’t need to. What is their criteria that turns browsing into buying and not more streaming? I put that one question to the below artists.
