Janszoon

I wouldn't be so sure about that. You really have no way of predicting future developments when it comes to this kind of stuff.

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A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Time & Place

25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die

last.fm

Rage Against the Machine

Last December I lost my music library accumulated over about 3 years, which seemed devastating at first but turned out to be totally refreshing for me, since it weeded out all the stuff I had listened to once and didn't enjoy enough to re-listen or dislike enough to delete. I think large music libraries are overrated, I'd much rather have a collection of a few hundred albums that I love than a few thousand I barely know anything about.

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RVCA

What kind of stuff?

someonecompletelyrandom

Computer crashes.

Mrd00d

While it's an interesting point you all raise, I'd like to expand on RVCA's idea of the collection lasting a long time and who knows how long we've got until we can't just download what we want on a whim.

When I filled up my external TB hard drive with 100k songs and some movies, the first thing I did was take it to both of my friends houses and copied all of it to their drives. So there are 3 versions of my collection. It's already done its job once. I carry my external around with my laptop and the wear and tear got to it; I broke in the USB port of the drive by pressing too hard... But I've got the back ups.

Everything new I download straight to the laptop and when I go visit my friends I update their drives. They hardly download anything (one doesn't even have internet, and the setup I gave them left them thousands of hours of media to go through) so I basically got the master and I keep it in as good of order as I can. If I lost all my computer stuff, one trip to a friends house would bring me to 98% completion, and then just have to figure what I had on the computer that I didn't transfer to their drives yet.

I'm thinking of buying an external that I can just fill up, unplug, and put in a safe box until I need it.

Long story, short ... make backups for your big ass collections.

And yes, I worry about how much longer we can carry on as we are with torrenting and downloading. When I go on downloading binges I feel like there's an urgency (lol) for some reason and that I need to hoard as much as I can find as fast as I can. When demonoid and pirate bay get messed with, I worry. I got really worried 6-12 months ago when the US gov't was going after the pirating sites with legislation and petitioning the website hosts to take them offline and ISPs to block them. I don't know what happened because it all went a bit mum, but this was when demonoid changed from .com to .me

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Mrd00d's Last.fm

Odyshape

Been the exact same situation for me literally the same thing. So great being forced to actually think about watcha wanna listen too.

Psy-Fi

When I started downloading music, I went on a binge and acquired more music than I could keep up with. I have albums from several years ago I still haven't listened to yet.
It will probably take me 2 or 3 years to catch up with all of it.
Now I keep my downloads to around 15-25 per week and listen to all of them.
I don't think I'll ever stop adding to my collection, though. (As long as I remain above ground, anyway.)

Unicr0n

I do something similar to Mrd00d, in that three or four of my friends have copies (or large portions, in some cases, in that most people don't have a terabyte and a half of free space just for music) of my collection, and this serves a dual purpose. First, in the event of a hard drive failure I can reacquire my collection with minimal effort. And second, it introduces my friends to new music that they never would have found otherwise.

I've never felt 'burdened' by my collection -- I'm sitting on about 215,000 tracks, and most of the time I just run my entire library on shuffle (I've never been a huge 'album' listener, I kind of prefer the chaos of never knowing what's coming up next), and I'm quite content with that. I've been building this collection, with a few breaks due to lack of internet, for about ten years now, and I'm quite proud of it.

I also feel this need to sort of, I don't know, preserve music. I mean sure, all the famous, well known music is gonna be around forever, but what about all the lesser-known stuff, the stuff that barely anyone ever hears? Even if it isn't fantastic, it deserves to be preserved for future generations, at least in my opinion. So I acquire anything and everything that I can. I know I'll never listen to all of it, it's a literal impossibility when you look at my download vs. listening rate. But just to know that it's preserved, and that my friends, being how they are, pass around a lot of this lesser known music, and that it slowly sort of radiates out from my position to other places makes me feel like I'm doing something to maintain a medium that I care deeply about.

I literally lay awake at night thinking about all the stuff that is probably slipping through the cracks as I'm laying there -- small print runs that I'll never get my hands on, that will get lost in the folds of time. It makes me quite sad, actually.

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Go ahead, pick apart my tastes. I know you want to.

SATCHMO

I try not to acquire music faster than I can appreciate it. If I'm digging an album, but I know that I have recent acquisitions that I haven't listened to yet I won't D/L or buy anything new until I've given everything I have a fair amount of attention. I also make it a habit to dump my entire digitally stored collection and start from scratch about once ever 2 years that way it keeps things fresh and I can be more fully engaged in the discovery/appreciation process. And even though a lot of members wills hate this and disagree with me, I absolutely despise when people D/L full discographies in a single shot, especially when it's an artist they're relatively unfamiliar with. It's like going to a van Gogh exhibit in a museum, seeing Starry Night and saying "Yeah I love that. I'll take a copy of one of everything in the building. Just send it all to my house", and then turning around and proceeding to go about their merry way.

Ska Lagos Jew Sun Ra

When I used to download whole discographies, I was bad about this. Lately though, I've only been downloading single albums, and it works for me.