Digging is dead, long live digging

I'm working on putting together a deep house mix for my Mom... in the course of pulling together a rough playlist I've been adding a fair number of tunes to my wantlist... listening to a bunch of Ron Hardy mixes from back in the day "the day" being the mid-to-late 80's (props to Gridface and Sueno Martino for the great resource, highly recommended)

I'm noticing an interesting phenomenon... as I run across tracks that I don't have, I'll google them... and at least 50% of the time if not more, they're available on youtube. Now I love my vinyl, but that's friggin awesome! I know, it's also illegal, but hell... so were the re-press bootlegs of disco classics... and those would still be hard to find! and anyway, I'm the poster child for digital music availability stimulating demand for physical product.

I'd probably not be so geeked about it if I didn't have Serato Scratch as part of my setup... but I do, so I am.

I do however ponder the fate of the physical record collection as a signifier of one's love of music ...dare I say connoisseurship? They'll pry my vinyl from my cold dead hands (thanks to a traumatic early adulthood record collection liquidation that's too painful to recount now)... but let's be real, my collection has always been utilitarian... it's not like I've got a bunch of 8-track tapes sitting around.

So, vive la Youtube! (Unless it's my intellectual property, in which case, where my lawyers at?!?)