Ecoustics’ Eric Pye shares record storage tips inspired by his recent trip to Japan.

After 4 years of being Japan-less during the pandemic, I finally made it back for the first time in September 2023. I’m now back again for my second trip in a year.

Feeling blessed.

I arrived two nights ago, and am still heavily jetlagged. Woke up at 2:00 a.m. yesterday morning and today, and knew that attempting further sleep was futile. This morning I was reviewing Instagram posts from last year’s trip, and came across this shot from Modern Jazz Jamaica, one of the Sapporo jazz kissas I visited. While there I roughly calculated they had 7,000-plus records stacked about the place. I wondered how they were sorted.

Yesterday I spent time in Shinjuku (where I’m staying my first three nights) and did some jazz record shopping. The question of sorting came up again as I tried to figure out the organization in each store I visited. Some order by artist in general, while others sort first by instrument and then artist. The biggest difference I noticed is that all stores sort alphabetically by first name, not last.

That all got me pondering frequently asked Instagram questions on organizing my music collection, both how I sort physically, and how I catalog and organize everything.

Continue reading the full article on ecoustics: https://www.ecoustics.com/articles/record-collection-sorting/

This article originally appeared at ecoustics.com and has been published here with permission.