Just wait, kid. Next week you’ll hate it!
I heard something the other day about poor Generation iPod that kind of cracked me up. Until the mega gig iPods came out, most people I knew had what I would consider a handful of CDs or LPs and that was their music collection. Truth be told, they watch a lot more TV these days, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But now they’re trying to understand this new phenomenon that people with even 50 GB of music are somehow getting bored with their music.
I’d just laugh and figure that the music/media industry hasn’t known what listeners want for 20 years or more anyway usually, but then I ran into this exchange. I don’t think I actually own 25,000 songs. That used to require a truly dedicated music nerd many years to accomplish. But in these days of bittorrent it makes a situation like the first response to actually happen.
Here are a few details of my playlists that have helped me better enjoy my large collection:
1. 100 random songs than have been added in last 120 days that I’ve never played.
2. 100 songs that I’ve never played yet.
Why would anyone do such a thing? That’s like buying 9 or 10 albums and not even being interested in them enough to listen to in 4 months! I realize that this stuff was probably stolen, but why steal what you don’t even want or won’t even use?
I’ve filled another cabinet!
Most of all, I think we’re winning. Sort of. If the geeky afflicion of not having enough music (c’mon – if you’v got a spouse they’ve probably asked at least once, “When will you have enough music?”) actually creeps out into the public at large we may actually see radio station playlists change. Right?
They could change, right?
I do my eMusic thing, downloading 30 songs a month for a set fee. Only in rare instances have I downloaded from iTones. Plus I collect the occasional download from a blog that posts some cool songs. I don’t just grab stuff willy-nilly, though. Who wants tracks they’re never going to listen to? And I’m not a “shuffle” guy – you know the type, one who wants to his shuffle on those 25,000 in hopes of no song repeating for the next 8 years. After I download my new songs from eMusic, I listen to them regularly for the next couple of weeks. What sticks stays on my computer and gets burned to a CD. What’s only good for having on file just in case gets burned to a disk as a data file, so that I can load a hundred tunes that I may never listen to again…just in case. I delete those files from my hard drive. Every once in a while I’ll pull up the songs on these data file backup CDs and see if anything is worth saving back to the hard drive and burning as a regular CD for playing. It’s NEVER the same as pulling out an album.
On a slow weekend afternoon, my wife will say “I’m bored. Wanna go hit a record store?”
Yeah, that’s right. I got the best wife ever and all y’all can suck it.
I do almost all of my listening from external hard drives on computers with good powered monitors. Two identical drives at home and a third backup drive in an undisclosed location.
Itunes says I have 54527 songs (312.14 GB, more than will fit on an ipod), and I never get bored or fatigued. So my advice to these troubled youths is to get twice as much music, and the problem will solve itself. (It also helps if the music you acquire doesn’t suck.) And it would never occur to me to use the shuffle function. I always listen to albums. I do have an ipod nano for use at the gym, but I listen to albums on that too.
I never buy from Itunes, because of the DRM and the proprietary file format. But I buy as much music as I can as legal non-DRM mp3’s. I only buy CDs if I can’t get the music I want in that format, and then the CDs are immediately ripped and the mp3’s put on the hard drives.
Avoiding the purchase and download of 24,000 songs that suck is tremendous advice for today’s iYouth, BigSteve. Once again, RTH does its part to help out.
Awesome advice, BigSteve! I look so forward to things coming out, or finding something I’ve wanted for so long. I play the hell out of the few albums I bought most recently, and then I start digging through what I’ve already had. Sometimes I find I’ve neglected something and should have listened differently when I bought it, but not usually. When I’ve been digging through the archives too long, I go buy more new stuff.
Great48, my wife hates getting stuck in a record store with me. She goes and finds the Stones section, and promptly tells me where it is, while I’m still looking through “B.” She’s pretty great, though. I get to be the one that picks the radio station or the music because I’m the only one it matters to. But I’m never going to be able to take my dream vacation of visiting every brewery in Pennsylvania and making side trips to record stores every day.
You raise questions I’ve asked myself for a long time now.
I have about 5,000 CDs (and that’s counting a 10 CD set as 1), 2,000 CDs of downloaded concerts, about 1,000 LPs, and several hundred singles.
I’d guess there are easily 300 CDs I’ve never listened to. Why? That’s easy – not enough time. Why do I buy them – that’s harder.
Part of it is “Because I can”. I have the disposable income and music and books are my vices. I don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t do drugs, don’t care about cars, wear the same clothes for years until they fall apart.
So I buy music. And DVDs (I have probably 250 that I’ve never watched). And books (there are shelves of those in every room, virtually all of which – around 500 – are unread; there are 1000s that I’ve read packed away in boxes in the crawlspace). There are stacks of magazines unread – 3 years of The Atlantic, anywhere from a month to 6 months of The New Yorker, Mojo, and many others.
Which isn’t to say I don’t read. I’ll read a book a month; it used to be a book a week but they’ve been replaced by the 4-5 magazines I read in a typical week. And I listen to music all day long; I work from home and music is pretty much always playing. But still the piles of unread, unlistened to, and unwatched grow and grow.
I read a theory recently that said that people that do this psychologically also believe they are buying the time to read/watch/listen. I think that’s me. I don’t ever need to buy another book; at age 53 I’ll never finish what I already have. I have enough music I love to last a lot more lifetime than I have left. I know I’m kidding myself but I fully believe I’ll listen to every disc as I buy it. And read every book as I buy it.
But still I buy. Something strikes me, some idea, some music and I act. I listened to Mr. Mod’s Mahmoud Ahmed and thought it was great, so I click on that link to amazon on the side of the page and buy one. And I don’t doubt that if I really like it, I’ll buy 10 more –and will probably only listen to 3.
Or since I got my iPod, I’ve been creating a playlist of all the songs I remember from WFIL & WIBG from my youth in the ‘60s. It’s about 1,800 and growing, albeit slowly now. But Hy Lit died and I went to his website and I’ve been listening to the streaming broadcast there and periodically I’ll hear a song I haven’t heard in 35 years and I’ll have to have it. So I recently spent $20 on a Kit Kats 2 CD set in order to get “Let’s Get Lost On A Country Road”. I should have checked iTunes for it for a buck but I haven’t been able to make the leap to a file; I need that artifact. It’s nuts I know, but…
I am trying to restrain myself. I don’t download nearly as much from dimeadozen as I used to. I know I’ll never listen to any of that more than once. And I don’t buy nearly as many books. And the magazine subscriptions are fewer (aided, I’ll admit, by the death of so many music magazines – farewell Amplifier, farewell No Depression). And I’m down to about 200 CDs a year; I was up in the 300s for a few years.
One thing I don’t suffer from is boredom or fatigue from music. There’s always something new to listen to (even if for me that’s likely to be something decades old) and I haven’t gotten bored with Dylan or Sinatra or The Beatles or Motown after 40 years and I know I can listen another 40 and not be bored either.
“My name is Al, and I’m a junkie…”
[All:] Hi, Al!
Thanks for writing that up. I’m sure a lot of us can relate.
One thing I forgot, probably the most important reason as to why I continue to buy more CDs than I have time to listen to.
It’s the quest, the search for something new that takes me to “that place”. There was a time when so much music took me there. And in large measure the music that took me there 35 or 40 years ago still takes me there (which is why, really, I don’t ever need to buy any more music).
It’s hard to define “the place” (hard for me anyway) but I’m betting RTH-ers know what I’m talking about.
And it’s harder and harder to find music that does that. I know that’s the difference between being 13 and being 53. The vast majority of my favorites have been my favorites since I was a kid. The Beatles, The Kinks, Beefheart, Sinatra, Motown. Later a few more came (XTC, Robyn Hitchcock, Richard Thompson). In the last decade, only Buddy Miller and Robbie Fulks have been added to the list of artists that I am almost guaranteed to love and whose music takes me to that place. And the discovery of Northern Soul has cost me a lot of money (just buying import compilation CDs mind you, not the original 45s) but it has resulted in a lot of music that takes me to the same places that Motown takes me.
Maybe it’s function of time, maybe just aging, but I also know I don’t give an artist or a disc the time it might deserve. An album has to hit me right away or I move on. And I don’t really care about good albums anymore. I already have lots of great albums; there’s not enough time for the merely good.
But I keep buying and hoping. Maybe when this Mahmoud Ahmed album comes, that will be it; it will take me to that place.
I know what you mean time wise, Al. But I don’t understand buying something you don’t think you’ll play. Is that usually albums you’ve heard in the past and just felt like getting, but haven’t gotten around to, or is it new (to you) music that you really just don’t have time for? I’ve got some lp’s I’ve never played, but then I have other copies of that lp either in another format or a different pressing. So I’ve “heard” it, just not that particular physical copy.
I like the fact that you get the artifact. It’s much more time consuming to collect music that way, but it’s more rewarding (for me) to “find” that oddball or rare album I’ve been looking for. Sure, I can order anything on the Internets, but that’s not as much fun. How many albums at a time do you buy? I’ve found that more than five seems to mean that there’s one or two I’ll listen to once or twice and forget about for years. I did that with The Replacements, and it wasn’t like I was early to that party. But I probably could have at least seen them if I had paid attention and listened to the cd I bought, which is a cd I play all the time now.
I had a conversation the other day in the record store (something you can’t do with CDBaby or Amazon) and we were talking about music that can change your life. That may be part of that “getting there” you mentioned. I’m 46, and my stance was that by now, I really didn’t expect that. I used to really think it would, but I think that’s a bit of romanticizing on my part. It’s important to me, and necessary for my good mental health, but I still get up and go to work and worry about the normal things I worry about. Rock n roll isn’t going to change the world, but it sure would be less fun without it.
There’s also the idea of filling in gaps. I guess it’s the librarian in me, but I like to have the collected works of artists I think are important. Even in cases where I know what the good stuff is, I’m still likely to buy the less the good stuff, although I know I won’t listen to it much.
The concept of having things just in case I might want to listen to them does have an effect. Or I might need to check on something before I post an opinionated comment to RTH. It’s like a library has books to read and reference books too. Some of my collection is like the reference section.
And there’s also the hope that I’ll have time when I retire to listen to all this stuff. Except that the technology might make all of it obsolete should I live so long.
BigSteve has hit on a few reasons that cause me to buy things. 2K, I never buy anything that I know I won’t play but I do buy discs that I know will only get one play. That may be for filling in a gap (although that’s a less and less frequent reason; Elvis Costello could only suck me in that first go ’round) or because it’s something I think I should have “in case”.
One of my weaknesses is box sets. I like the idea and I like the packaging, particularly when it comes to Bear Family or Mosaic. But when I have the actually album there on the shelf it often goes unplayed. 4 discs of Webb Pierce is too daunting. I saw “There Stands The Glass” in the No Direction Home movie (I think that’s where I saw it) and decided that was a great song and wanted to get it. Really what I wanted was a nice Webb Pierce compilation. What I ended up buying was the Bear Family box. I knew it would be well done and the presentation would be great. So I bought it a year ago and haven’t played a thing. Who has time to suddenly investigate 4 discs of Webb Pierce? That same process has happened a dozen times with Bear Family or Mosaic boxes.
There are also a good number of discs that I’ve gotten to replace vinyl (although I still have the vinyl). I play them once, refresh my memory (since it’s likely I haven’t played the vinyl in 25 years or more) and file it away.
Unfortunately, practically everything I buy now is online. Here in central Connecticut, there’s no place left to buy music except for Best Buy or Target. There are two places that have used vinyl and CDs but the stock is terrible and never changes over.
Two weeks ago I was visiting a friend in Minneapolis and there is an absolutely fantastic store called Cheapo there. Tons and tons of used CDs; it took me 3 hours to go thru the new arrivals from the prior week (which are separated from the rest of the stock until the week passes and then they are filed into the artist sections).
I bought 15 discs for a total of $70. Part of buying that many at once was because I don’t get the chance to just prowl thru racks and buy something that I stumble on. I bought 3 Time-Life comps of ’80s stuff (for a total of $5), another ’80s comp and 3 ’70s comps. All were cheap enough that they were certainly worth it for the two or three songs in each that struck my fancy. I bought Linda Ronstadt’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2 (following the discussion here), a Joe Walsh best of, and Herb Alpert’s Classics Vol. 1 (my dad used to play Herb Alpert a lot, so this was just for nostalgia’s sake). Those 3 were $3 each. I played them once and put a few songs onto my iPod and it’s not likely that I’ll play them again.
I also got one of the Charlie Rich discs that was mentioned here a few weeks ago for $9, the Proclaimers latest disc for $10, and a Jimmy Swan Bear Family single disc set for $13 (mainly because it was Bear Family and the cover looked great; I’m not familiar with Swan at all). Throw in Bill Medley’s disc from last year (because he sounded great on Letterman a few months ago) and an Ennio Morricone disc that were $5 each and I was happy with the lot. I’ve played the Charlie Rich disc but none of the others yet.
I promise not to bore everyone any further with my justifications for buying so many CDs!
I was reading some stuff on Pere Ubu’s website (because they’re performing Jarry’s play in London with stage design by the Quay Brothers — wow!), and I came across a couple of quotes relevant to this discussion and the other one about packaging:
And:
We really need to get David Thomas subscribed here. Thanks for pulling in his balanced words of wisdom, BigSteve.
And there’s also the hope that I’ll have time when I retire to listen to all this stuff. Except that the technology might make all of it obsolete should I live so long.
That, or the inevitable coming pandemic of vinyl-eating bacteria.
I was very late in getting an iPod/mp3-player and didn’t expect to have much use for the Shuffle function, but I’ll speak out on its positives. I still use the iPod to listen to the full albums I have on there or to seek out specific songs, but I’ve come around to using the shuffle quite a bit for a few reasons, none really being the hope of never hearing the same song again.
Primarily, it’s a great way to fill the hole of radio. Hearing a song I love on the radio always has a special charge, even if it’s a song I’ve heard countless times and have owned in several formats, because I didn’t specifically seek it out, it just showed up and reminded me why (or that) I loved the song in the first place. Given the state of radio, the few thousand songs I’ve loaded on the ipod so far are already more than any station’s playlist, and I can be assured that this particular DJ has impeccable taste.
The other thing I’ve enjoyed is some of the juxtapositions that pop up, either by artist, tempo or genre shift. I’ve mentioned this to someone here offlist/site, but I think my favorite back-to-back Shuffle moment has been an MF Grimm-to-MF Doom diss track/lament followed up with Sinatra’s “The World We Knew” and immediately registering a weird connection between them that got more out of them for me than hearing either in isolation.
So I guess I expect a healthy balance of intentionally listening to specific songs/albums and mixing them up to get a “selectively random” experience to help fend off any new wave iFatigue. Then again, while skewing towards the younger side of the RTH demographic, I’m still older than the mico-attention span generations, so the whole idea might not be an issue in the first place.
I bought an iPod specifically to hold downloads from my adventures in music blog trolling. I also have it loaded up with song fragments I record of me playing guitar or piano, pieces that I call raw ether, stuff that I come up with while messing around and record pretty much immediately on a hand-held cassette recorder–ideas that might become completed songs one day (I may go mini-disc soon to cut down on the hiss and motor noise, though I’ve grown to like that particular sonic texture). About 4000 tunes and counting. A bit over half-full.
I have very few albums loaded up on it. If I want to listen to an album, I usually want to do that at home, so why bother transferring it? I mainly use the shuffle function, as I like the unexpected juxtapositions and not knowing what’s coming next. Works nicely for my commute and walking around town. I do wish one could shuffle within a selected folder. That and having it stream WFMU live.
I also have podcasts from Radio Lab, This American Life, etc on it for long road trips. My old Volvo wagon is not much in terms of sound-proofing, so the spoken word works much better in that rumbling environment.
All I have is an old iPod Shuffle. The shuffle function, as Alexmagic notes, is a good facsimile of radio…the way it was meant to sound.
I’ve never needed a reference library. I just don’t have the money or patience, and I totally understand what Al means when he says he only has time for great albums. There sure are a lot of great ones, though. I have a sort of list in my head of older stuff I mean to get around to getting, but I don’t mind not having everything someone ever released. Some bands I do, but most I just need a few things. That Bear Family stuff never really appealed to me mostly because I usually have no idea what it is, but I really wish someone would put out the stuff I like in such a loving fashion.
My mp3 player is just a 1 gig flash player. I have to change songs out on it, and I kind of wanted it that way. I take a portable hard drive with my other stuff on it with me on long trips, but otherwise, I kind of like dealing with some of the limitations of my portable storage space.
When I hit shuffle, it’s usually when I put just random songs on there. I like to just drag and drop a song or two from an album, and just hit shuffle and then be surprised. It’s really cool in the airport. The other times I like to use shuffle are when I just take a disk from comps and mix them up, like Rockabilly and Nuggets and Left of the Dial. That AUX port on car stereos these days is supremely cool! It makes me not miss my satellite as much, at least for music. Talk is way better on satellite than regular radio. Especially shows that can run for over half an hour without commercials. It’s neato.
Have we factored in the ease of file sharing with one’s friends as part of the dynamic here? For instance, over the holidays I essentially traded recent downloads with various friends and came home with, say, 200+ new albums for just several days of trading. In the last two months I’ve listened to maybe 30 or 40 of them. I didn’t pick up everything, just the things that other people had that I wanted. I expect that sooner or later I’ll listen to more than half of it but probably not all.
I never feel music fatigue, nor do I get bored with my collection. That said, I do find it hard sometimes to pick something to play because there’s so much choice. I get paralyzed by the breadth of my options. The feeling doesn’t last more than few minutes usually. So when I say “I don’t have any music” or “I don’t have enough music” what I mean is “I’m overwhelmed by how much music I have and I can’t think straight.”
I still buy CDs, but no more than one or two a month. That’s not too bad, I don’t think.
I used to have a personal rule of never buying more than two albums at a time. I seldom broke that rule. It was based on the idea that I couldn’t absorb more than two album’s worth of music in a week. When I did break the rule, I did find that one album would get the short shrift.
I would bring it home, avidly study the cover as I played it two times in a row. An album would not get filed away until I had properly absorbed it, as well as lost the immediate charm of a new fascination.
I find iTunes very difficult to browse – even with the new “cover flow” view. It’s not the same as standing in front of my collection and having it all before me. Thus, I do find myself choosing the same things over and over when listening off the computer.
My iTunes is a very funny thing – initially, it started off as the collection of a co-worker who bought an iPod and his computer didn’t work with it. Subsequently, he loaded it up with stuff that I am still discovering three years later. My favorite find in there was a band called Hopkirk and Lee. I recently found his Nada Surf mp3’s and a ton of music from Honeybus.
I wonder what is the most anybody on this list has ever spent in one visit to a music shop. Nowadays, i feel very music at sea – my wife made her first iTunes store purchase a week ago, I find it completely uninspiring. Maybe Amoeba will open up in my basement.
My one-stop record is about $350, at the Brass Ear in Hays, Kansas in the summer of 1983. When we moved to (relatively) nearby Russell that June, the movers lost a box of LPs that belonged to me, and I got an insurance settlement to replace them. Ironically, I think there were maybe four or five of the LPs that I actually replaced: the rest was all new stuff to me.
Bear in mind that this was $350 in 1983 money, so we’re talking in the neighborhood of 40-45 LPs.
Amusingly, years later I discovered that Jon Harrison of Little Hits fame grew up in Pratt, Kansas, which was about half again as far to the south of Hays as Russell was to the west, and that the Brass Ear was his teenage record store of choice as well! Chances are strong that we browsed the racks side by side some two decades before we actually met.
I recently just got an iPod. After years of loading up iPods for friends from my music collection, I finally was given one (I tend to be somewhat of a luddite). Friend would hand them over to me and a week later I would give them a nice sampling of deep tracks and overlooked gems to hopefully guide them to new music discovery.
I look at the iPod more as a radio substitute. In fact, I tend to fill mine up with interesting podcasts and stuff I’ve found from trolling music blogs. What I like I tend to later burn to a CD.
Buying music on the net isn’t the same as when you hit a cool record shop. Every addict needs a good dealer. Speaking of which, I am sure some of you are aware that this Saturday (April 19) is Record Store Day. A day set aside to share the joy and support independent record stores.
http://www.recordstoreday.com/
I had no idea about Record Store Day, Petesecrutz. Thanks for the tip. We’ll bring it Main Stage.