If the above title has raised your eyebrows, you are probably the main target group I want to address. It already means we share so many things, prompting me to bring up a few contrarian opinions that may seem unpleasant to the reader. In that case, I would love to be challenged, and the best place is right here in the comments.
For the better part of my life, I was denied access to original CDs and tapes, let alone vinyl. These shiny, beautiful objects were simply nowhere to be found where I came from. My resources were limited to copying low-quality cassettes. We did not even have a CD player until I was in my late teens. If you asked the fourteen-year-old me what his dream is, he would have answered listening to music on original CDs and bragging about them to others. There was simply nothing cooler and more luxurious for me than a CD shelf with colored original albums, putting them in a player, and then turning up the volume and talking to others about it.
That dream was never realized until I moved to Sweden and began collecting. But the time had already changed. When I first arrived in Stockholm, the first places I asked to see were the record stores. But there weren’t many, and I…
