I grew up in a small town that only had two record stores, neither of which carried used records. Whenever we would go on vacation to a bigger city, I would beg my parents to take me to used record stores so that I could look for Prince stuff. My Holy Grail was the "Let's Work" 12" single which had the mysterious "Gotta Stop (Messin' About)." I never did find it in a record store, but I found a copy of Goldmine magazine and ordered it through that. In the end the song was kind of a disappointment. I got the bootleg vinyl of the Black Album through Goldmine as well, but I found the bootleg CD in a record store.

I don't think the Internet has taken away the fun of finding new music. If you had told the teenage me that one day I could listen to almost any Prince song out there by clicking a few buttons on a computer, I probably would have fainted from excitement. But the proliferation of counterfeits has made collecting less fun. There were no counterfeits of official Prince releases when I was growing up, just bootlegs of unreleased recordings. I never thought that any CDs would go out of print.

[Edited 6/14/11 20:29pm]

blackbob said:

.

you cant beat going to the record shop and getting a new vinyl album in your hands...i miss those days...

.

.

[Edited 6/14/11 2:11am]

[Edited 6/14/11 2:20am]

Amen to that Bob. I could spend hours in the "Stow"

blackbob said:

..i had played 'purple rain' to death the previous 9 months since its release and had all his albums on vinyl ( all six...doesnt seem many now )...it wasnt like it is now with mass information just a click away ...i only found out the previous week on the radio that the album was coming out...

I did the same. I remember reading about the Around The World In A Day's release on Ceefax! (showing my age here) about a week before.

I remember wondering why the album had had almost no promotion prior to release, and thinking whether I'd missed something.

The album sleeves and liner notes are what I miss the most

I know I'm super young, and was not in existist in the 80s, but I LOVE collecting Prince vinyl, Around the world in a day happened to be my first Prince record I got . Now I have alot more, and I love going to this huge music/movie store in Hollywood, they have had rare stuff there. Love looking through the records

apart from the megastores (hmv) which i never frequent i couldn't tell you where a record store is within a 100 mile radius.