Too Much Music

NPR:

I know far more today about albums I hated in 1990 than I do about my favorite albums released last year.

Sigh.

Yeah.

The ease of purchase and my adult income have made buying records far too easy. IT just piles up. And though I never really got into the pirating thing, I did dabble. I scooped up a lot of stuff all at once. And most of that is now just gathering dust out in the seldom-visited sectors of my network storage box.

The author of the linked piece tried to get back in the habit of fully-absorbing a new record in a rather rigid way - which is why it failed. But I'm trying to do it by simply buying less new/new-to-me music. And if I find something new I really like, I'm not rushing out and grab everything else by that band; I just absorb that one record as best I can.

6 thoughts on “Too Much Music”

  1. Rob Caldecott

    I still buy music if I really like an album and I love immersing myself in it when I find something good.

    Most of the time I use Spotify although I spend far too much time choosing what to listen to next: it’s almost overwhelming at times. It’s the Netflix effect.

    But I’ve also come to depend on Spotify to hear new stuff and after trying all the major streaming services it’s still by far the best at discovery and personal playlists. They recently created a playlist called Time Capsule that is full of songs from the 80s/early 90s that is absolutely perfect. And every Monday they deliver a new discovery playlist that contains stuff I like without fail.

    But streaming still makes me a little nervous. Music is a massive part of my life and renting it monthly seems to cheapen it in a way, hence I still cough up £££ to own things (digitally, I don’t buy CDs any more.)

    How do you discover new/old music?

    1. cleek Post author

      recommendations here and there, snooping around on AllMusic.com (“similar bands” is handy), sometimes i’ll catch something new on satellite radio.

      i’ve never really loved streaming. the Sonos stuff does it, so we use Spotify or Amazon’s thing when we’re too lazy to pick out an album. but i like the idea of having an album (even if it’s just a bunch of MP3s).

    1. cleek Post author

      i bought it when i was running my software biz. i wanted a safe place to store all my stuff. you put four hard drives in there and even if one drive goes bad, the data’s still safe – just pop a new HD in and it will redistribute / index / whatever to make itself happy again.

      now it just holds music and pics.

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