A Record Store in Oakland

I still collect files like some people collect vinyl—MP3s, AACs, FLACs stacked across external drives. Japanese city pop from the 80s, video game soundtracks nobody else remembers, anime music from shows maybe twelve people ever watched. Stuff that lives nowhere else because the rights are tangled or the market was always too small.

For years I tried to make Spotify work. You’d find something, listen a few times, and three months later it would vanish because of some licensing dispute nobody bothered explaining. So I went back to buying files, and that’s when Bandcamp became the place that mattered. It wasn’t trying to be everything to everyone. It just wanted independent artists and strange music to exist.

I found things there I never would have heard otherwise. City Pop. Metal bands from Uganda. Electronic weirdos from Russia. DJs from Iceland. It felt different from the algorithmic churn—less like scrolling through predetermined options and more like actually stumbling onto something.

Artists on Bandcamp started selling physical formats again. Cassettes, vinyl, CDs. Real objects. And then they opened an actual record store in Oakland—a building where you could walk in and flip through records the way people used to, before everything went invisible and algorithmic. I haven’t been there, but something about that idea stuck with me.

I don’t know if any of it lasts. Probably doesn’t matter much in the long run. But there’s something about insisting on owning the files, buying direct from artists, the fact that a record store can still happen—something stubborn that feels correct.