"WHY WE COLLECT" - FROM VINYL AND BOOKS TO NFTS AND RETRO CARS: NEW MEANINGS OF OLD PASSIONS

But every time the needle touches the vinyl, when we open the crisp dust jacket of a first edition, or wait for the final gavel strike at an auction, an old and honest feeling awakens in us: I am here, I have a history, and I can continue it. The year 2025 has only confirmed it: collecting has ceased to be a "niche passion of peculiar aesthetes." It has become a language in which Gen Z argues with algorithms, millennials negotiate with time, and boomers reclaim their right to slow pleasure.

WE COLLECT TO HOLD ONTO WHAT IS SLIPPING AWAY — WE MASK THIS SIMPLE THOUGHT WITH HUNDREDS OF RATIONAL ARGUMENTS: INVESTMENTS, SCARCITY, LIQUIDITY, "SETTLING ACCOUNTS" WITH ADOLESCENT DREAMS, AND FINALLY — A FORM OF SELF-CARE AND CARE FOR OUR LOVED ONES.

Vinyl is the clearest example of how a medium with "flaws" triumphed over convenience. The American industry has reached a symbolic milestone: in 2024, U.S. recorded music revenue reached $ 17.7 billion, with streaming surpassing 100 million paid subscriptions for the first time. Yet, alongside this, vinyl continues its nearly two-decade-long growth; this is not a fleeting trend but a stable "secondary circuit" of listening—almost ritualistic, tangible, and collective.

The latest RIAA report states it dryly, making it all the more significant: vinyl remains the primary physical pillar of the music market, while other physical formats are either stagnating or becoming marginalized. A skeptic would say, "That's America." But in Russia in 2024, according to data from the largest marketplaces, vinyl sales on these platforms nearly doubled year-on-year—from 21.6 to 40.6 thousand units—with revenue more than doubling. In 2025, this trend has made headlines in federal media, and cities are gaining new "points of gravity"—stores with listening stations, community evenings, and club releases.

Even cassettes, seemingly relegated to museums, have unexpectedly resurfaced in reports: in the first quarter of 2025, their sales jumped by over 200%—the laughably small absolute numbers transform into a serious narrative: we want to hold music in our hands, even if it lives in the cloud for most of the day.

At the other extreme are books, the quietest object in the home and the loudest in cultural memory. Auction reports for 2024 show double-digit revenue growth and an increase in the average lot price; this trend in 2025 is confirmed by those same small sensations: in August, a 1937 "The Hobbit" sold at auction for £43,000, found, as usual, on an ordinary bookshelf—a coincidence, but a symptom of an era in which rare editions are not only an investment but also a way to assert one’s education and taste. In Russia, the listings of rare book auctions—from "Litfond" to regional secondhand booksellers—remind us every week: paper culture does not exist in opposition to digital culture, but alongside it, as a slow method of inheriting meaning. A digitized text is, of course, more democratic; but the first printing, the proofreader’s marks, the owner’s bookplate, even the smell of dust—these are the very "imperfections" we are willing to pay for.

And yet, if the 2010s were the decade of "tangible" nostalgia, the 2020s have added a new layer—the digital. NFTs have journeyed from euphoria to reassembly. Figures from the summer of 2025 show a sharp monthly increase in July—up 50% compared to June, with a volume of approximately $ 585 million, though the market still remains below its December 2024 peak. Simultaneously, researchers recorded an $ 8.2 billion turnover in the first quarter of 2025, growth in active wallets, and, most importantly, institutionalization: the share of professional players has significantly increased, and major auction houses are not exiting the digital art space but are quietly establishing a "new normal" for sales. In Russia, mainstream media discuss NFTs without illusions, but also without panic: these are not just "little pictures," but an infrastructure of access rights, club privileges, and long-term online communities. A digital collection no longer needs to be an antagonist to a physical one: a limited-edition vinyl record can grant access to a private set, a paper catalog can unlock a closed chat for collectors, and a car club can provide a tokenized pass to a "garage" metaverse.

Where an object becomes a sign of community, a resale market inevitably emerges. From sneakers to limited-edition watches, from vinyl to comics, the secondary market in 2025 has ceased to be a gray area. Data from the largest platforms indicates billions in annual turnover and shows that for some generations, reselling is a primary way of entering a culture, not parasitizing it. A typical teenager from Yekaterinburg now just as naturally "trades" extra copies on a marketplace and maintains a spreadsheet of transactions as their father once maintained a home catalog of cassettes. In StockX’s global data, the sixth "Culture Index" for 2025 records the sneaker resale market at around $ 6 billion, with a notable share belonging to Gen Z, for whom resale is a part of consumer literacy, not a shameful side hustle. In Russia, resale platforms have long ceased to be eccentric: from niche marketplaces for limited sneakers to local communities, the "second life" economy for goods has become the norm. And this is evident not just in fashion: on Avito and specialized forums, a thriving economy exists for retro tech, rare lenses, comics, and music releases.

In Russia, this is compounded by its own economy of scarcity for new cars: the secondary market is reviving interest in rarities and "surviving" specimens, while car clubs are transforming into stubborn communities of memory, where technical documentation holds the same weight as a chronicle. In the end, retro cars function as time machines: they lack CarPlay, but they possess the smell of leather and metal, which cannot be simulated.

Somewhere between record store displays and bookstore windows stands the car—perhaps the most cinematic object of collection. The retro and youngtimer car market in 2025 is undergoing a correction without a crash. The Hagerty indices have "slowed down," and by mid-year, experts are talking about a "new normal": some segments have plateaued, others are being revalued—and this only underscores the market’s maturity. Beyond the high-profile auctions, local stories thrive: family "restorations" of forty-year-old sedans, garage renovations, or modest but rapidly appreciating models from the 1990s.

Of course, the shadow sides haven’t disappeared either. The NFT market still allows for manipulation and speculation; the retro car market requires a cool head and access to service history; rare books are a field for fraudsters with fake dust jackets; vinyl pressings are sometimes revived out of pure speculation, not love for the sound. But the maturation of a collector is precisely the accumulation of practical rituals: checking provenance, studying catalogs, reading forums, consulting the community. In this sense, the culture of collecting becomes not only therapy but also a school of civic virtue: you learn to be responsible for your decisions, for what you introduce into your life’s narrative.

But what do a vinyl collector, a gatherer of "first editions," a hunter for a Porsche 912, and the owner of a tokenized digital painting have in common? The answer is boring and beautiful: we are all seeking an anchor. Objects—both physical and digital—give form to experiences that would otherwise slip through our fingers. Vinyl captures sound in its "noise," a book captures text in its physicality, a car captures speed in its materiality, and an NFT captures belonging in its provability. In 2025, this anchor has acquired another crucial function—resistance to forgetting. We are tired of the endless scroll, where everything is equally important and equally forgettable, and we are returning to things that have weight. Sometimes literally—like a 180-gram vinyl record with high-quality printing; sometimes symbolically—like a "Hobbit" without a dust jacket that turns out to be more valuable than our habit of utilitarianism; and sometimes in a utilitarian-network sense—like a token that prevents a club, an evening, a meeting from being erased from memory.

Author: Maxim Gerasimov