DIGGING IN EXCESS
BETWEEN DIGITAL ABUNDANCE, PARALLEL ECONOMIES, AND LISTENING FATIGUE
Not really a platform in the traditional sense. Rather an underground network, a parallel market where files circulate freely, without rules, without mandatory payment, without real traceability. What passes through it is not only rare music, it is also a form of value detached from any official economy. Artists receive nothing. Yet for many DJs, it is an indispensable tool. There one finds records lost for a long time, obscure rips, entire catalogs vanished from conventional circuits. It is at once a treasure and a moral dead end. Everyone knows well that this zone sits outside any formal economy, but the access it represents is too precious to give up. Here, digging gains in depth as the links with the real conditions of musical production wither away.
What "knowing how to search" means now
This shift from scarcity to abundance transforms the very nature of the skill. Research on the various electronic music scenes, notably the work of Gábor Vályi, shows that today, value lies less in the possession of rare objects than in the ability to move with discernment through considerable masses of sound. Digging becomes a practice of filtering, a practice where accurate listening spots singularities within otherwise homogeneous musical flows.
Vinyl, the gesture, and the conformism that comes with it
In this context, the return of vinyl in certain electronic scenes resembles an attempt to reintroduce friction into a system that has become too fluid. Attending a DJ set where only records are played is anything but trivial. The act is visible, the handling tangible, the physical stakes seem real. There is a presence, a risk, a direct relationship to sound and its temporality that the digital medium does not engage in the same way. But this valorization of the vinyl record also holds its share of ambiguity. In certain scenes, it is no longer a choice but indeed the tacit norm. And as always, when a practice becomes normative, it generates, in series, its own codes. Formats converge, structures align and the margins of surprise shrink. What once distinguished now homogenizes.
The money question everyone carefully avoids
Then there is the concrete and brutal factor of cost. Producing vinyl today is expensive. Pressing plants are saturated, raw materials more costly and production timelines longer. A reality documented by the IFPI as well as Music Business Worldwide. Distribution prices bear witness to this. On secondary markets like Discogs, certain records reach sums well beyond their original value and their practical usefulness. The record becomes a dual object: a working tool and a speculative asset. Vinyl record digging, often imagined as a pure and disinterested practice that would take place in small record shops haloed with an aura of authenticity, is inevitably caught in the trap of these speculative economic logics.
Two hundred listens for nothing
This hybrid context: digital abundance, informal circulation, material scarcity, amplifies the tensions within digging. There is always more to discover, abundance has not disappeared, it has intensified. But it does not give itself up easily. It demands time, concentration, a form of endurance that can be exhausting. Listening to hundreds of tracks to keep only two or three, and sometimes even none at all. Coming back, trying again, doubting. A fatigue sets in, alongside a sensory overload. And yet, DJs must continue to build something coherent and personal. Finding a throughline without repeating oneself or dissolving into the noise. A delicate balance.
And yet, despite the fatigue, despite the contradictions, digging remains deeply gratifying. For many, it is even a sort of anchor thrown into the sea that serves as a landmark. One learns enormously. Slowly, almost imperceptibly. The ear grows sharper, memory grows richer and patterns emerge. This shapes a relationship to music, quite fortunately, but also to time, to attention and to subjectivity. A demanding practice, if not an ungrateful one, but rarely entirely devoid of meaning.
The tools are coming. Now what?
It is in this tension between constraint and a certain pleasure (sometimes subversive, as we have seen) that digging persists. It is not entirely defeated by digital abundance, nor completely frozen by vinyl fetishism. It mutates. New forms are already emerging as technologies evolve: AI-assisted exploration, algorithmic analysis, vast sound databases to exploit. But these tools will not replace the act of searching in practice, they will simply shift its contours. Tomorrow's digging will probably be more hybrid, probably more assisted, it must be admitted, but it will always rest on one central skill: finding as much as making sense of continuous and overflowing musical flows.
Thus, far from being on the verge of disappearing, digging changes form, adapts, absorbs its contradictions which it brings back out positively into practice. And this is perhaps where one of its essential characteristics resides: an activity that never quite settles, that continues to find meaning and to establish subjective hierarchies where everything seems chaotic, already given and yet overflowing with hidden treasures.
To continue reading :
Gábor Vályi, Digging in the Crates. Practices of Identity and Belonging in a Translocal Record Collecting Scene, Doctoral thesis PhD in Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2010.
IFPI Global Music Report, 2025