Questlove has more than 200,000 records in his collection.
The musician has been accumulating vinyl for years and his hobby has stepped up recently because so many radio stations are using digitized playlists and getting rid of physical copies so he’s been snapping them all up and he now needs four “gargantuan” storage units to house everything.
“I had a normal record collection … 60,000 to 70,000 records. But one by one, radio stations started digitizing everything, because they wanted to make more space, and they were like: ‘What do you do with the physical copies? Throw them away?’
“So I started getting calls from this jazz station in Alabama, or this former soul station in West Virginia: ‘Hey, man, we got 12,000 pieces that are probably going to go in the garbage …’ I’m up to 200,000 records now. I have four gargantuan storage units,” he told the Guardian.
In addition to paying for storage facilities, Questlove admits he’s also having to spend huge amounts of money insuring his collection and getting someone to put it in order.
“Just to insure those records and find someone to categorize them is almost like buying another house. I don’t know if it’ll get done in my lifetime,” he added.
Questlove, whose birth name is Ahmir K. Thompson, has also been busy writing several books about music history and working on a documentary about Sly Stone. He’s adamant that musicians need to do more to preserve their past, and he regrets not saving items from his early days with The Roots.
“People were living for the day, living for the moment, not thinking about history. So I stress to artists now: dude, every sketch pad, every direction you take from a telephone, save all your history because you never know when you’re going to need it,” he added to the publication.
