We all know somebody who has a way larger record collection than us, typically because they inherited every dusty album from their relatives' basements without taste-based discrimination. Absolutely no one has anything on Brazilian bus magnate Zero Freitas, who has been buying up record collections for years. The total number of albums in his collection? No one really knows, and he told New York Times Magazine it was around "several million albums."
Even that's an understatement, considering he just bought the entirety of a three-million album collection from a dealer in Pittsburg. He also bought the entirety of New York's Colony Records when the shop closed in 2012. His collection also contains interesting niche subjects, such as Cuban records, of which Freitas owns nearly 100,000 of. That's almost every album every pressed in the country.
The entrepreneur currently has a team of 12 college interns that catalogue around 500 records a day, which is still hardly enough to keep up. Roughly 30 percent of Freitas' collection are duplicates, which still doesn't seem too bad considering the sheer volume of his collection.
The good news: He's willing to share. The ultimate goal of this project-even if it wasn't Freitas' plan from the beginning-is to create a huge archive of albums titled "Emporium Musical." Imagine the warehouse from the end of Raiders of The Lost Ark, except with turntables set up for listening purposes. Our vinyl-loving eyes are watering just thinking about it. And all the duplicates? He plans to set-up a library system to allow checking them out for home listening.
