FOMO anxiety driven hoarding.
1 Like
Well, for certain artists I think the best thing that can happen is for their records to remain sealed & never played.
However, in the real world I agree with you. It reminds me of a retired business partner who looked over my first BMW in 1992 & said āItās a really nice car, now what are you going to buy for daily use?ā. He couldnāt grasp that I bought it to drive all the time & all through his retirement he owned luxury cars which were only driven on Sundays & holidays, driving a secondhand Golf or similar the rest of the time!
2 Likes
I find Dylanās work most enjoyable when recorded by other artists, but I do have his version of Man in the Long Black Coat from Oh Mercy in one of my playlists.
1 Like
Do you remember the time when streaming was not possible? It was either radio or buy and play.
2-4 CDs per week per 20 years is 4000 CDs, so not really a lot. An the value is immense, if you cannot understand I better donāt attempt to explain.
And all this music has probably saved me from worse addictions.
1 Like
Unintentional comedy?
Anybody go to the theatre 4x per week? Buy 4 books? 4 gigs every week? Every week for 20 years?
I averaged 1 album a week independent of format over 30 years. Within that would be the odd month or even week Iād spend Ā£300 but then, having done that, I valued the music and gave each album the time it deserved. No album had less than 4 plays. Manyvwell into double figures before their initial filing away. All played to the point Iād memorised the track listing and possibly lyrics. Some disposed of on the basis of zero redeeming features. Some put away in the hope Iād come back to them and they would click. Some did. Some didnāt. If I went to London or Manchester and blew Ā£300 in a day (in the 1990s) then the chances were Iād buy nothing for maybe 6 months. Sometimes longer. The focus was always the music and never having to buy out of habit.
Always an exception to be made. If I saw a CD Iād not seen before and considered I might not see it again then it was purchased without hesitation and regardless of cost. A principle which has held up well as I have many CD rips of albums I adore for which masters were lost by record con-abuse in certain fires etc.
The value is in the quality of the purchase and the quality of the repeated listening experience. There is zero value in regular purchases. Itās a habit to no great purpose. Buying because itās what you do and because stuff is there. Not buying with the purpose of obtaining g quality or quality listening.
Itās not hard to calculate how many hours music you have and the chances of listening to each once or once more before you die. It soon focuses the mind on practicality.
Funnily enough nothing has changed for me because of streaming. On a Friday morning Iāll review the new releases from Qobuz and Tidal and favourite new stuff I either wasnāt aware was out or had been looking forward to. That stuff gets played to the point a decision is made. Occasionally Iāll add up to 10 albums in a week. Mostly itās 2 or 3 at the very most. The onesI keep run between zero and 2 per week at the absolute most.
Again, music not habit.
1 Like
Well. The life expectancy of a male in the UK is something like 86 so thatās 18 more years of listening to music for me.
3 albums a day thatās 20,000. Iām currently listening to my 5th album of the day.
Itās probably not sensible to judge other peopleās buying/collecting habits based on your buying/listen habits.
And whatās the point worrying what other people do.
For me it was
Teenager to 30yrs vinyl.
30 to 50 CD.
50 to 68 vinyl.
For the last 15 years Iāve been buying records at auctions. Usually job lots, with records Iām not interested in and ex cond going to the local charity shops.
Iām seriously thinking of buying a CD player, so Iāll be down to the local charity shops buying up CDās at 25p each. 
A fun time ahead for me.
5 Likes
I suppose when your collection consists mostly of first pressings, reissues do seem rather pointless 
Spoken with equal parts envy and admiration.
1 Like
Yes, if you do the mathematics, for a person who started buying records in their teens, and now has arrived in their sixties, it is easy to arrive at over a thousand albums on LP or CD.
Imagine I buy just one LP/CD a month and I started at 16 and am now 69. That sums up to 636 albums. If I buy one a week thatās 2756 albums.
A lot of collecting revolves around a perceived future value of special editions, first pressings and so forth. A lot of the albums I see on Bandcamp play on this, with different coloured versions. Taylor Swift plays this game with multiple versions of albums. I have an original numbered red vinyl version of the old Steetwalkers Red Card album, bought at the normal price, back in the day. I saw it selling in a record shop a few years later for over Ā£100, when the band were still playing or at least Roger chapman was still a ānameā. On Discogs you can now snag a good copy for Ā£5. This cured me of the urge to collect special editions. I would hazard to say that our prized music collections are just future landfill.
My tastes revolve around the outer reaches of Jazz these days. I like to listen to what is new and being played today. These CDās are mostly made in small pressing runs by mostly obscure labels, and appear for a while before disappearing. I might buy four or five in a week and explore them over the next few weeks. I might not buy anything for weeks. I think I average out at one a week. Some albums get played a lot. some are mistakes that I play four or five times before giving up. Rarely an album everybody is raving about is removed from the CD player and filed away before it finishes because it sent me to sleep. (ECM are masters of this type of album).
1 Like
My father had 3000 books.
I have 3000 CDs.
All Things Must Pass.
9 Likes
As I am currently travelling, Iām not sure how many CDs I have of each artist. I would think the highest number would be + or - 12 for the likes of Bob Dylan, Brian Eno, Genesis, Pink Floyd, Van Morrison.
I do know that I am approaching 2800 CDs. All have been played, some only once or twice. There are a number that may get played once a year, whilst others on weekly basis.
Obtaining a new CD, getting it home and listening to it for the first time is still exciting. Only two weeks ago I managed to buy a few secondhand Keith Jarrett CDs, as recommended on this forum, and was amazed by how wonderful the music was. How had I got to this point without hearing this great music before?
I like to think of the music that I have as a library, as others in this thread have described. It allows me to have a variety of music across a spectrum of genres to select music from at any given time. The library has grown most since my retirement 10 years ago. Most important, is that both Mrs B and myself spend many happy hours choosing music and listening to it together from the library. Indeed Mrs B as an avid reader of online news outlets keeps me up to date with recent releases.
All of our friends in the area (we are a very social group of retirees behaving badly who meet for long lunches several times a week) like to listen to music but mainly via Spotify. When they come to ours they always like the Playlists and the sound quality. Though none of them to date has gone any further than owning a boom box.
So I prefer the term that I am a music librarian but I can understand others viewing this as an addiction. I just know that the library keeps me very happy and long may it continue.
2 Likes
The curse of the collector is real, apparently!
For myself, I only have maximum of 2 copies of any one album, one on vinyl and one on CD. Also, I annually cull my collection, appraising every album as to whether I really like it enough to keep. I try to keep numbers down to about 1500 CDās and 300 vinyls due to storage contraints.
3 Likes
Yes, itās the solid blue triangle first pressing.
There are nuances in the multiple copies but they are far from essential!
Gary
1 Like
Well said, this should be pinned to the top of the forum 
2 Likes
Healthy life expectancy is about 61 so I wouldnāt hold your breath on how much youāll get through. 
They put them out there to be discussed/judged so I donāt really see the issue with that. I wasnāt judging by my standards. Merely making the observation that I have only ever bought what I could listen to. Owning multiple copies is something weāve likely all done. Some learn the pointlessness of that. Some donāt. The question is whether you can really enjoy something if youāve got so much of it itās only been played once or not at all.
As for worry, ultimately thereās a level which has zilch to do with music and everything to do with addiction. Itās not really me who needs to worry on that front.
Indeed. Nothing more sobering than selling your collection of a format. No-one really gives a toss about the depth of the cardboard, the quality of the pressing, the quality of the remaster.
Iām definitely not a completist, but I understand the appeal of focussing on a favourite artist, tracking down all the rare and obscure recordings, and so on.
I have approximately 3,300 records, among which my listening pattern is wildly uneven. I have many records Iāve played to death and beyond over the last 40 years, but also a good many I may never get to listen to before I fall off my perch. The appeal for me is knowing that there will always be unfamiliar music on my shelves, waiting to be discovered. I donāt think of my collection as just a compendium of all the music I know I like, I also think of it as a library for discovery, to dip into as inclination strikes.
My record buying has fallen off sharply in recent years, so I suspect Iāve reached a kind of equilibrium. Last year I bought a Degritter, which has given me an incentive to revisit the neglected corners of my collection. Itās very satisfying to pull out a record I might not have listened to in decades, clean it up, and hear it as if it was new.
5 Likes
Itās so easy (and costs virtually nothing) to download from P2P sites live bootleg recordings and copy them to a disc or leave on a hard drive. The problem is most of them are of dubious quality and certainly doesnāt correlate with what most users here strive for with our systems.
Some are legendary performances, some will hold personal attractions (went to that concert etc), the rest not worth it. Unless you want to impress with your ācollectionā 
Thatās a point @AndyP do most count the box sets as āsingleā or do they count the releases in that box set for their collections?
I count them as single, 
I think my collection is about to grow massively and for free
2 Likes
I thought my 5 versions (one a download) of Kind of Blue excessive!
Iāve 3 CD versions of Colossal Youth by Young Marble Giants. One was purchased because it included the Testcard EP. The third was a remaster 
. Suffice to say I only play the original album minus the EP and minus the remaster. Actually I think there was a Peel session in there too.
Nice to see someone else on this forum has Colossal Youth!
1 Like