[AStonesThrow]

In my misspent high school/college years, I was in search of very obscure, unpopular music, on independent and import labels. I began to find that much of the music that appealed to me was the fruit of collaboration between certain artists, producers, and labels. So I began to trace them out and, at that point, new music discovery consisted of finding brief and obscure collabs among the circle of artists that I was targeting.

For example, The Cure was exclusively signed to Fiction Records, which was more or less a vanity press for them, but they indeed had labelmates who were really, really obscure, and could always be connected back to Cure personnel.

It was sort of an amazing feeling, that everything was really interconnected in unexpected ways. In hindsight, all that music was a terrible influence and I was wasting time and money, but I also learned quite a bit about the record industry and collectibles, such as how to appraise the value of a piece, detect counterfeits vs. authentic pieces, and methods for archiving and preservation. My parents had collected postcards, stamps and other ephemera, and it sort of rubbed off on me!