dessalles

Been messing around with a little web app and I think I’ve finally got it to a point where it’s worth sharing. The code is an absolute mess, featureless bugs infest every function, playback is super temperamental (just hit refresh) and you can’t pause (yet). But it works:

Watch My 45

It’s nothing fancy or particularly useful. In short, you watch (and listen) records uploaded to YouTube by some amazing reggae collectors: firebladerr1, oldwah and mrrk. I first came across this community last summer and what struck me about them was how successfully they’ve been able to digitize the experience of being a record collector. By recording their collections as video, instead of audio, some amount of ownership over the music they’ve collected is maintained. When you watch one of their 45s, you’re very much aware that you’re watching a specific record owned by a specific person. And in so far as that’s the case, I hope some sense of fulfillment as collectors is preserved. Because as much as we talk about property and ownership in information economies and the such, we continually forget to address the emotional aspects of those things.

As an experience designer, I suppose what interests me about these videos is how much more you get than the great music. Every record has its own character – its warbles, scratches and pops. The beginning of each video isn’t the beginning of the song, it’s the beginning of vinyl playback. And the labels on some of these records are insanely cool.

Anyhow, more than anything I just wanted to make something simple and fun that people/I would want to use. I promise you, every 10 min or so you’ll find yourself thinking “damn this is such a good song”.

Ok, so a couple logistical notes…

• You might get a Mike Tyson or kitten video between songs – I’m just randomly pulling from their libraries.
• If you’re a collector or you know of a collector that would be a good addition, please leave a note in the comments.
• Haven’t even bothered checking to see if it works in IE. Could someone please take a look.
• If you’re a capable developer (which I’m not), you’ve got some free time and you’re interested in helping me clean up the code and add some new features, lemme know.