Columbia Chronicle

The vinyl web frontier

Website gives music aficionados a chance to show off collection

By Jamie Murnane

A&E Editor

Most music lovers are showoffs. They love to tell everyone about the latest unknown band they believe theyπve discovered and tout their massive CD collections. All hail the mighty music aficionadoãor record nerd, as some, such as Josh Sisk, like to say.

Sisk, a 27-year-old Washington, D.C., native and self-proclaimed ≥avid record collector,≤ is the creator of the website www.recordnerd.com. Recordnerd.com allows music lovers worldwide to list their collection for all to see, or, as the site states, to ≥brag about your records.≤ On top of that, members can list what records (CDs, vinyls or imports) they have to trade and those they are looking forãcreating a show-and-tell music swapping community.

Recordnerd.com launched in 2001 when Sisk decided to make a list of his collection that was easily accessible to update from any computer. At the time, he and his friends were the only users, but now Sisk said there are now more than 7,000 members on the siteãand that number is steadily growing, as there is an average of 1,000 to 1,200 unique visitors each day. And the enormous collective amount of albums, 672,631 to be exact, is enough to make any music lover drool.

≥A lot of people have only a few records listed but some have thousands and thousands,≤ Sisk said.

Now that heπs out of college and runs his own record label, McCarthyism Records, Sisk said he doesnπt have much time to update and improve the site, but said when members e-mail him good suggestions, such as deleting users who have nothing listed, he usually complies to keep everyone satisfied.

≥It pretty much does what it needs to do,≤ he said.

And people seem to agree.

Eventually, Sisk said he plans to implement a new and improved trading system where members can swap automatically through the site rather than having to e-mail each other.

≥Iπd just make it so that you could click on a record that you wanted and write a message to the person through the site and offer up a record of yours thatπs on your trade list,≤ Sisk said. ≥Itπd be easy because you could see what they have and they see what you have so itπs like åIπll trade you this for this.π≤

Though the trading opportunities on recordnerd.com are a dream come true for some, Sisk realizes there is also a downside.

≥One negative aspect is that I think a lot of people use it to trade burned copies of CDs,≤ he said. ≥I posted a notice about that a while back to tell people itπs kind of lame. But I donπt really stop people from doing it. Thereπs a semi-threatening message on there that says youπll be deleted, but Iπm not really going toãespecially if thereπs over 5,000 lists on thereãIπm not going to look through all of them. Itπs too much.≤

Sisk said he has never done any advertising for recordnerd.com, aside from a banner ad for his record label. When someone creates a list, Sisk said typically they tend to show it to their friends, who in turn make a list and show it to their friends and so on and so on. If word keeps spreading as it has been, soon recordnerd.com will be as catchy as that damn OutKast song. But for now, itπs the music collectorπs latest unknown discovery.