Questlove owns 200,000 records

Questlove needs four storage units to house his huge record collection credit:Bang Showbiz
Questlove needs four storage units to house his huge record collection credit:Bang Showbiz

Questlove has more than 200,000 records in his collection.

The musician has been accumulating vinyl for years and his hobby has stepped up recently because so many radio stations are using digitised playlists and getting rid of physical copies so he's been snapping them all up and he now needs four "gargantuan" storage units to house everything.

He told the Guardian newspaper: "I had a normal record collection ... 60,000 to 70,000 records. But one by one, radio stations started digitising everything, because they wanted to make more space, and they were like: ‘What do you do with the physical copies? Throw them away?’

"So I started getting calls from this jazz station in Alabama, or this former soul station in West Virginia: ‘Hey man, we got 12,000 pieces that are probably going to go in the garbage …’ I’m up to 200,000 records now. I have four gargantuan storage units."

As well as having to pay for storage facilities, Questlove admits he's also having to spend huge amounts of money insuring his collection and getting someone to put them in order.

He added: "Just to insure those records, and find someone to categorise them, is almost like buying another house. I don’t know if it’ll get done in my lifetime."

Questlove - real name Ahmir K. Thompson - has also beeb busy writing several books about music history as well as working on a documentary about Sly Stone and he's adamant musicians need to do more to preserve their past as he regrets not saving items from his early days with The Roots.

He added to the publication: "People were living for the day, living for the moment, not thinking about history. So I stress to artists now: dude, every sketch pad, every direction you take from a telephone, save all your history because you never know when you’re going to need it."