Baby vs. Vinyl: The Sublime Art of Having It All

Things started small: I received an old turntable and a single shelf of vinyl records from my father. 

The new infrastructure was easy to implement with a small investment in a stereo setup and a few minutes fussing with wires. My new role as music manager came with legacy workloads that I inherited, such as Elton John and Jackson Browne. As with any transition to new leadership, I re-prioritized my department’s work; I moved away from 70’s soft rock, choosing instead to focus my resources on hip-hop and jazz. 

I developed a strategy that enabled my organization to support these exciting new workloads, and designed a five-year plan that reflected my expected limitations in terms of space and budget. I intended to expand my footprint and purchased several shelves to store the new records I anticipated. Many of my industry peers were moving away from vinyl at the time, instead turning to cloud as-a-service offerings for their musical workloads.

I was incredulous: “You mean, you don’t actually own the rights to the music? And you pay a monthly subscription fee for access? And you can’t listen at all without an internet connection?”

 No way – it sounded insane.

Music was important to me and I liked having my infrastructure where I could see it, touch it, and (in the case of my thrift store finds) smell it. I craved the comfort that came with having legal ownership over my equipment and physical control of my records. Sure, my turntable would break from time to time, but it wasn’t anything that a few hours with a screwdriver and a soldering iron couldn’t fix. I was, after all, a professional. I demanded 24/7 availability and was willing to fire up a generator if worst came to worst.

Within a year after implementing my new plan, it became clear that I had grossly underestimated the amount of storage space I would need. Though I had intended to focus on jazz and hip-hop, I picked up several other workloads, including classical and indie. My storage requirements ballooned well past expectations with new additions arriving daily from eBay, thrift stores and garage sales. I had allocated space and budget for two shelves; they rapidly expanded to five, and then within another year, to twelve. One turntable became two, and my bookshelf speakers became full-size floor-standing behemoths.

Tensions arose with business stakeholders (my wife*) over my department’s out-of-control spending and the sprawling rows of shelving that were taking over our home. We created document retention policies designed to offset new record purchases by requiring that old ones be removed first and enacted a ban on Goodwill. Enforcing these policies turned out to be difficult, and we maintained an uneasy compromise of me doing what I wanted.

Then, in September, my business priorities shifted in dramatic fashion. Word came down from management that a new, top-priority workload would be introduced into my life: a baby. This turn of events was most certainly not in my forecast, and the financial and space limitations that I was already exceeding were now even more stringent than before. The old approach could no longer work; I needed a new way to handle my musical goals that allowed me to function in this new business landscape.

It was time to adopt a hybrid strategy between on-premises vinyl infrastructure and cloud musical resources. I began by implementing a music-as-a-service offering, which allowed me to remove non-essential workloads, such as classical, to the cloud. I sold all my classical records and no longer use on-premises resources for classical music, which freed up a couple of shelves. Next, I digitized some mid-tier workloads, offloading the copies to Amazon S3 and then moving the physical records to off-site storage or selling them. For example, I still wanted some access and control over my indie workload, but didn’t prioritize it highly enough to surrender any potential baby-space. Instead, I dedicated on-premises resources solely to mission-critical workloads, such as Oddisee, Oscar Peterson, and Donald Byrd.

Through my hybrid project I was able to reduce my on-premises storage footprint to a reasonable four shelves. Plus, putting a foot in the cloud gave me some new capabilities I hadn’t expected. Records aren’t exactly known for their mobility – having cloud-based music resources has made listening at my desk and in the car much more pleasurable. I had thought that relinquishing control over part of my infrastructure would be painful, but it was liberating. In fact, I realized that my infrastructure was controlling me, instead of the other way around, as anyone who has seen my vinyl maintenance regimen can attest.

Switching part of my infrastructure to the cloud also helped me keep my financial obligations to my business stakeholders. Using a monthly subscription model provided predictable cost plan compared to buying records in random binges and having fewer shelves cut my cooling costs by increasing the airflow in my home. I also made a little bit of money by selling records and equipment I no longer needed, which helped to offset my more reckless spending from the past. 

Overall, the decision to switch to a hybrid approach made my life a lot easier. I am now able to keep my mission critical workloads on-premises in vinyl format, while still having access to the cloud for music that isn’t as important. My upper-level management is much happier now that my budget is predictable and my space requirements are lower, and now I feel more prepared to take on the challenging child-based workloads of the future. Most importantly, I have extra cash in my pockets to buy my wife sushi and champagne after the baby comes. 

Can you relate? Drop me a line at [email protected] or click here to put some time on my calendar.

*If you read my last article, you might think that my marriage is in trouble. My LinkedIn articles are exaggerated for comic effect – we’re good! My wife took the picture of the baby doll drowning in vinyl - she is my perfect counterpoint in this world.