Located in an unassuming mall in Urbana, Illinois, Record Swap kickstarted what has become a lifelong passion of physical media collecting for both my wife and I.
For a long time while I was a child, it truly appeared as if vinyl records were exclusively a product of the past – an obsolete media form that we only heard stories of from our parents as the age of CDs and digital media fully took over throughout the 1990’s and 2000’s.
My perception of what it meant to physically own music growing up wholly revolved around CDs, making wire racks and disc binders just as ubiquitous as the disc itself during this time. Customization was possible with the advent of burned CDs, and you could even look for songs you didn’t have if you were willing to go the LimeWire/Kazaa/BearShare route.
Yet by the time I enrolled in college in the fall of 2014, the climate surrounding physical music media began to noticeably shift far away from CDs and towards a return to vinyl – skipping over the brief period of cassette dominance in the 1980’s.
I got my first record player, one of those poorly made briefcase-looking machines, towards the end of my sophomore year as I began to gain interest in owning records. Something about the massive cover art, the odds of unique features being found inside the sleeve and the decades of history behind the medium drew me in – at least to the point that I wanted to have a few of my own just to have around.
For a few years, that’s all my record collection was. A modest handful of albums that I greatly enjoyed, played on just about the most substandard record player one could find with no stereo system.
Not unlike just about everybody else in the world, my life changed quite a bit due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. I was working as an overnight news writing intern for WGN-TV in Chicago when lockdowns sent just about everybody home, leading to my workload drastically decreasing for the remainder of my internship.
My extended tenure of working remotely as an intern allowed me to move to Urbana, Illinois with my then-girlfriend as she began her five-year Ph.D program at the University of Illinois. We rented a small, one-bedroom apartment in Urbana’s downtown area, located a short walk away from an organic grocery store and an extremely liminal mall that looked like it previously had around triple the tenants it did at the time we lived there.
Upon walking into the mall for the first time, it was impossible not to notice the one tenant that was present – Record Swap. An impressively large brick-and-mortar store for records, the store is quite frankly unlike anything I had ever seen then or seen since.
A staple of the Champaign-Urbana region since its opening in 1979, Record Swap features a dizzying selection of new and used reocrds – with a distinct slant towards jazz, soul and reggae music, including an especially large selection for those genres.
Yet beyond what they offer to any other dork just looking to pick up vinyl they don’t have yet, one visit to Record Swap left me with a greater realization: physical media is still here in full force, and it’s absolutely worth preserving and saving,
Beyond the swaths of records spanning every genre from classical guitar to punk rap, the store also offers what many of its contemporaries across the country do not – an equally impressive and expansive offering of both cassettes and CDs, the latter of which were essentially always at a price that was impossible to beat.
Though I was initially only meaning to collect vinyl, coming across a copy of Nas’ Illmatic, perhaps my favorite album ever recorded that I had eagerly showed to Kathleen just a few months prior changed things. Kathleen suggested that we start collecting CDs as well, which began an equally fun journey of chasing down music that’s new for us to explore.
We remained in Urbana through the first five months of 2021, making near-daily visits to Record Swap to rapidly build our collection of vinyl, CDs and even DVDs and Blu-rays, which the store also included a solid selection of.
Frequent visits to this store also exemplified that buying and collecting physical media is much more than just spending money – it’s finding something new to explore each time, diving into a genre you’d never think of examining. While you can find knowledgeable employees at just about every record store out there, hearing stories and expertise from those who have seen the evolution of the music industry over the years helps to develop a deeper appreciation of what it means to collect and preserve physical media.
Record Swap’s owner, who goes by Bob, is a shining example of this. A lifelong veteran of collecting and selling records since the store’s opening during the Carter administration, Bob would often share his personal experience with whatever record or CD you were purchasing, helping to add a bit more context and meaning into whatever you were taking home that day.
During my purchases at the store, I was delighted to hear stories of Nirvana’s October 1989 visit to Champaign long before they became a worldwide sensation, or of the boundless inventories of rare reggae records that can be found inside the record stores of Jamaica, Queens, New York, which Bob always insisted was a better bet to find reggae music than stores in Kingston, Jamaica itself.
It’s also impossible for me to forget the direct help he offered when we purchased stereo equipment for the first time, pointing us to the stereo receiver we use to this day along with a pair of speakers that fit perfectly for us as we took advantage of the store’s limited but very useful equipment selection.
By the time we moved back to the Chicago area in the summer of 2021, record collecting became a staple activity for both my wife and I – something we greatly look forward to when traveling or when we’re simply looking for an easy way to get out of the house and find something new.
Between video games, vinyl records, CDs and DVDs/Blu-rays, our collection spans nearly 1,100 items – enough to fill in lazy, rainy days for the rest of our lives and some. What was a fleeting interest flourished into what I hope will be a lifelong passion, something we both can always look to make progress on while learning more and more about the history of the art we consume.
In all likelihood, I will never visit Record Swap again. The store lies a whopping 2,087 miles away from our home in Chico, California, in a city we are quite unlikely to find ourselves in from here on out. Yet without this store hidden inside a mall that looks like it hasn’t had a decent crowd since 1997, perhaps the extent of my collection would still be a small handful of albums I listened to in college on a briefcase record player.
There is history and beauty inside many things we overlook in our day-to-day lives – and you simply never know when you may uncover something novel in a familiar place.
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