Why do we do this?
For the record.
Altera Musica is a marketplace for rare and ethnic music in analog format (vinyl and cassette).
We sell (and buy) every kind of musical finding you can ever imagine - or not.
If you are looking for any second hand vinyl or cassette that is unusual yet popular, bizarre yet traditional, we probably have it, or had it, or spasmodically looking for it.
About us
Altera Musica is an offbeat company founded in 2023 by an enthusiastic ethnomusicologist interested in every sort of popular and/or traditional music, a value-scout of renowned or unacknowledged music genres (who physically looks for published analog recordings wherever they are available) and a visionary funder... all three in the same person.
We have what we call a "museal-attitude" towards records and cassettes - especially if second-hand: for us, they represent a document, a symbol, a spatial soundmark from the past. If we could, as collectors, we would just put those musical findings in glass cases and leave them there. But we can't and, eventually, we don't want to.
Our goal is to find as many "odd" records as we can and get them into circulation, because we believe in the value of the otherness, of the alterity. Altera musica is indeed a latin sentence that echoes the name of a fundamental book, "L'altra musica", written by the italian ethnomusicologist Roberto Leydi, which could be translated as "The other music"; meaning that they exist other forms of making - and consuming - music, and that what we are used to listen to in the famous broadcasters is just a small drop in the ocean of music history.