The unexpected birthday present that turned me into a vinyl addict

Last year, my mate Tim bought me an incredibly random birthday present: a record. He handed it over like it was the most normal gift in the world. There was just one problem...

I didn’t own a record player.

The record itself was great: Tremonti’s Marching in Time. Tim and I had been to see them live in London as part of that album’s tour a few years earlier, so he’d clearly put some thought into it. I looked at the record, looked at Tim, and said something like “Cheers mate! This is so cool. But, umm, what am I supposed to do with it?!” He just shrugged and casually said “I dunno, I thought you could get into record collecting!”

Well, that was about a year-and-a-half ago, and I had no idea at the time that Tim had started me on a crack-like addiction.

From zero records to a dozen in two weeks

That same lunchtime, Tim and I wandered into 101 Collectors Records, our local record shop here in Farnham, and I walked out with two more records. (Tremonti’s The End Will Show Us How and Rage Against The Machine’s incredible self-titled debut, one of my favourite albums.) Two weeks later, I went to Farnham Record Fair and somehow left with another nine.

So before I knew it, I owned twelve records and still had nothing to play them on, which is a mad way to start a hobby no matter which way you look at it. At that point I stopped pretending this wasn’t happening and drove to Richer Sounds in Guildford, where I bought one of the cheapest record players they had and a pair of bookshelf speakers to go with it. That was it. I was officially a bone fide record collector.

It’s worth saying at this stage that I’ve always been big into music; that's not new. I grew up in the back of my parents’ car, listening to whatever they had on. That meant everything from rock like Meat Loaf to Queen, endless The Beatles, and 80s pop and synth like The Eurythmics, Genesis, Fine Young Cannibals, Paul Young, Blondie, Foreigner, Tears for Fears…

The first two tape cassettes (yes, I'm that old) I bought with my own money were Michael Jackson’s Dangerous and the classic Bon Jovi compilation, Cross Road. Then CDs replaced tapes and my collection started looking very grungey. Then MiniDiscs took over for a brief but glorious period during the nu metal era, before the world finally went digital with the dawn of the iPod. And, finally, streaming arrived, pretty much signalling the death of music as we knew it.

Or so we thought.

Because it's now 2026, vinyl (and physical media in general) is having a comeback, and some of the bands I loved as a teenager are as big as they’ve ever been. I feel like the stars have aligned and I’ve got into this new hobby at an incredible time.

How a hobby turned into Nutshell Vinyl

Not long after I bought my turntable, I set up an Instagram account just to share my growing pile of records. I had no plan beyond that.

What I found very quickly was a huge, active, and genuinely welcoming community of record collectors and music obsessives. The engagement on even my earliest posts caught me completely off guard. I’ve had a personal Instagram account for years that has never achieved any sort of decent engagement. Turns out having a specific niche and an engaged community behind it makes a difference. (Who knew?! I'm a marketer...)

The account wasn’t even called Nutshell Vinyl to start with. It was originally Spins n’ Stories, and it stayed that way for about five or six months before I changed it.

The name comes from the song Nutshell by one of my all-time favourite bands, Alice In Chains, from their record-breaking Jar of Flies EP. But I actually discovered Nutshell in a backwards order. I bought their incredible Unplugged CD when I was eighteen while travelling around South America, and played it on my Discman until the thing genuinely broke from overuse. When I decided to rename my account, Nutshell felt right straight away.

At the time of writing this post, my account is still tiny in ‘influencer’ (I hate that word) terms, sitting at just under 3,500 followers. But the bit that actually matters to me is the fun of sharing my collection, making new friends and discovering new bands. I’ll write a separate post about that soon, because I’ve discovered some incredible new bands in the last year and that’s all been thanks to this crazy record collecting journey I’m on.

Why rock, grunge and metal

There’s no marketing strategy behind niching down to rock, grunge and metal. It’s just the music I’ve loved since I was a kid, and a lot of my collection is simply the vinyl version of albums I already owned on tapes, CDs and MiniDiscs back in the day.

Like I said earlier, what’s made it even better is the timing.

Nu-metal is having a proper resurgence right now, and a lot of the bands I loved in my mid-to-late teens are still touring and bigger than ever. Limp Bizkit, Guns N’ Roses and Linkin Park are all massive again and recently headlined Download. Deftones are killing it, and released Private Music last year to huge acclaim, followed by a sold-out world tour. Korn are still out there filling arenas. Like I said above, it genuinely feels like I started this hobby at the perfect moment.

What 18 months of collecting has actually given me

If you ask me why I collect, the honest answer is a bit of everything at once.

There’s the nostalgia, which is enormous. It only takes one riff or the first two seconds of a song to drop you straight back into a specific memory from being a teenager / young again. That’s a strange feeling and, yes, it can make you feel very old, but it’s also one of the best parts of doing this.

There’s the format itself. When you put a record on, you listen to the album the way the artist intended, start to finish. You can skip a track by lifting the needle, technically, but I’ve certainly never done it. There’s something so refreshing about stepping away from streaming and algorithms, especially at a time when everything is built for three-second attention spans. I think there’s a much bigger cultural point buried in here somewhere, linked to the anti-AI movement, and it’s probably worthy of a post of its own. (Makes mental note to write that post sometime soon.)

Then there’s the community. I’ve made genuinely good friends via Instagram. They’re mostly people I haven’t met in person yet but who I hope to before long. It’s an overwhelmingly positive, supportive corner of the internet, which isn’t something you can say very often.

And honestly, there’s the addiction. I’ll come clean about that properly below.

I should also say that while rock, grunge and metal is the core of my collection, I’ve picked up records outside those genres too. I’ve got a few movie soundtracks, Hans Zimmer’s Gladiator and Interstellar, the Drive soundtrack, a bit of classical, some jazz for Sunday mornings, and a handful of old charity shop finds like The Godfather and Dr. Zhivago soundtracks. Oh, and every now and then I also pick up one of the aforementioned 80s pop and synth albums, for a hefty dose of childhood nostalgia and happy days.

The honest, slightly embarrassing bit

I now own around 115 records. In about 18 months. Having never owned a single one before my birthday last year.

I genuinely dread adding up what I’ve spent on this hobby. And here are a few habits I’ve developed that other collectors seem to relate to just as hard:

• Telling myself I’m not allowed to buy another record until the end of the month, then somehow owning three more within 48 hours
• Buying new records before I’ve even listened to all the ones from my last haul
• Walking into a record shop with a plan to buy one specific album from my wishlist and leaving with four, none of which were on my list

Anyway, I can’t slow down any time soon, because you know what they say: if you know how many records you own, you clearly don’t own enough!

What’s next for Nutshell Vinyl

Right now, Nutshell Vinyl still lives primarily on Instagram, but that’s beginning to change, starting with the fact you’re reading this on my new website. Welcome!

The plan is to use this site primarily for blogging and building a community rather than selling merch. (But if you fancy grabbing a Nutshell Vinyl tee or hoodie, that would of course be awesome!)

On the blog, you can expect things like:

• Interviews with: owners of independent record shops; up-and-coming bands; other collectors; and other people running record-related businesses
• Album and gig reviews
• Practical stuff for newer collectors, like what I’ve learned in 18 months of doing this, which accessories I’ve found that are actually worth buying, etc.

TikTok and YouTube are both on the roadmap too, mostly repurposing the Reels I’m already making, plus some longer-form videos down the line for anyone who’s getting as sick of three-second dopamine hits as I am.

If any of this sounds like your kind of thing… you are my people!

Here’s where to go next:

• Follow Nutshell Vinyl on Instagram for day-to-day record collecting content and to see what I’m currently spinning.
  
  
• Subscribe to my newsletter. This is what it’s all about. I’d love to build a community and my newsletter subscribers will always be first to hear about promotions, new merch drops, exclusive discount codes, collaborations, and announcements.

Thanks so much for reading and for being here. It honestly means a lot!

Russ 🤘🏻

P.S. Cheers, Tim. Look what you've started, mate!