Record Collecting - Notable Record Collectors

Notable Record Collectors

• Ray Avery, whose 63,000+ piece jazz record collection now resides with the University of California, Los Angeles.
• Joe Bussard, owner of over 25,000 1920s and 1930s American blues, gospel, folk etc. records.
• Pat Conte, New York area collector of 78s from around the world and host of The Secret Museum of the Air on WFMU-FM.
• British club DJ Carl Cox has a collection of 120,000 items.
• Josh Davis aka DJ Shadow, known for the album Endtroducing..... which was comprised entirely from samples. Owns over 60,000 records.
• Hip Hop artist Dr. Dre sold his 80,000 piece collection.
• Dave Freeman, collector of early country and rural string band records from the 1920s and 1930s, who compiled Echoes of the Ozarks, Mountain Songs, and other compilation albums on his County Records label.
• Record Collector 365 (August 2009) reported US collector Bob George as having an estimated three million vinyl records in his collection.
• Bob Harris (radio), BBC Radio 2 Presenter.
• The collection of Andy Kershaw, former BBC Radio 1 DJ, weighed seven tons at one point.
• Paul Mawhinney, founder of music store and record archive Record-Rama, who is known for probably having the world's biggest record collection across contemporary music genres, more than three million items, larger than the Library of Congress collection.
• Thurston Moore & Byron Coley, collectors of noise, free jazz, and avant-garde jazz. Coley has upwards of 30,000 items in his collection.
• Scott Neuman, owner of Forever Vinyl - Record Search Service and Music Appraisal Service, one of the first online record stores.
• Jerry Osborne, publisher of the first Record Price Guide in early 1976; the first of over 150 music and entertainment publications for his company, Osborne Enterprises Publishing.
• Alex Paterson from The Orb claimed in Record Collector magazine in 2009 to own 50,000 records and 10,000 CDs.
• John Peel, Radio 1 DJ, renowned for his barns containing hundreds of thousands of records across genres.
• Gilles Peterson, club and BBC Radio 1 DJ. Major jazz, funk, soul, and modern dancefloor music collector who had to move out of his flat to leave space for his collection.
• Tony Prince, ex Radio Luxembourg presenter and owner of DMC International.
• Mike Read, another former Radio 1 DJ, put his 120,000 vinyl records up for sale in 2009.
• Greg Shaw, creator of the Pebbles series, Who Put The Bomp magazine, and Bomp! Records.
• Harry Smith, compiler of the Anthology of American Folk Music.
• Joel Whitburn, author of the Record Research series of books cataloguing Billboard Magazine chart data. Whitburn's collection contains a copy of almost every record to chart on Billboard.