http://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news-photo/s-and-12-singles-stored-on-shelves-in-record-shop-london-news-photo/455712603
Zero Freitas is the owner of a private bus line in Sao Paolo, Brazil, but that venture may simply be a means to fund his real passion. According to a new profile in The New York Times Magazine, Freitas, bound by inexplainable compulsion, is on a mission to buy all of the world’s vinyl records.
“I’ve gone to therapy for 40 years to try to explain this to myself,” Freitas told the Times. The Brazilian millionaire has been seemingly unable to stop buying records since he was a child and has lost track of just how many are in his collection, estimating he owns “several million albums.”
But most impressive about his collection, which had reached 30,000 records by the time he was 30 and exploded after a split from his wife, is the rate at which it’s growing. In just the past couple of years, Freitas bought several collections which contributed millions of pieces to his own trove.
Freitas employs a team of a dozen college interns tasked with cataloging his mammoth collection. They are able to sort through approximately 500 records per day, but with the rate at which Freitas buys new collections, they received nearly 10 times that amount between November and June.
Freitas’ collection is incredibly varied and features upwards of 100,000 records from Cuba alone, which amounts to almost every album ever recorded on the island. Nearly 30 percent of his collection is composed of duplicates, something Freitas is now remedying by selling them off.
For the longest time, Freitas was buying because of sheer compulsion, but after some intense soul-searching, he’s decided to transform his collection into an archive called Emporium Musical. The Emporium will serve as a library of sorts, with turntables and listening stations for patrons to enjoy the records. And if a visitor should find a duplicate, they’ll be able to check it out and take it home.
