The Faustian Pursuit of Music Acquisition
 

Earlier this week I was skimming through my library, and I just realized how little of it I listen to...not because I actively choose not to, but because I've been habitually downloading albums for years just to have them. After thinking about this for a while, I realized how absurd (and incredibly self-indulgent) a practice this is.

Yes I'm being exposed to a lot of music.
Yes I'm learning about unfamiliar genres.
Yes I'm finding more and more music that I like.

But where does it stop? Where is the utility of having 100,000 tracks instead of 10,000? If there's not a finish line to cross, what purpose is there to amassing so much music this quickly? For my own benefit, so that I can operate like a musical sieve? No, I don't feel enlightened by this. Only burdened.

This is why I still haven't (purposefully) listened to an album released this year. It's one of the reasons I try to disregard end-of-year lists, because my first impulse is to acquire those "top" albums, stick them in a folder somewhere & forget about them until moments such as these.

Does anybody else feel this way, or are you the rest of you content with your music consumption habits?

I actually just realized this same thing myself. I have an ass-load of music that I haven't listened to and I probably download an average of 10-15 albums a week, most of which doesn't get completely listened to. I don't think it's a bad thing though, and I plan to keep downloading as much music as possible even if I can't keep up with myself.

My 30gb ipod just broke and I replaced it with a 4gb one which is fantastic for this situation. I've been making an effort to switch out all of the music on my ipod on a regular basis so i can listen to all of the things that i normally skim over in my library.

I can't see any downside to having more music than you can listen to, it just means you'll always have something new to listen to. Maybe I don't have as large of a library as you do, but I welcome crazy amounts of new music. It may be a burden, but it's probably the best burden ever.

Well the burden is inherent: the time you spend acquiring those albums could be better applied to enjoying them or any other ancillary activity. If you spend less time searching for music than listening to it, this situation can precipitate itself simply by a measure of accessibility; if music took as long to find as it did to listen to, then your consumptive rate is going to be much more limited.

It may sound shitty to say it, but I think the digital age equipped consumers with the tools necessary to transform the music collector into the music miser.

hahaha, the thing is, I listen to music while I'm download music. It's the secret loophole!

I listen to everything I download. I don't download constantly because I don't really see the point in having a ton of albums I'll probably never get around to listening to and it's best not to be overwhelmed by a huge amount of music. I need the space on my HD for other stuff as well. There's only a very small handful of albums in my library that I haven't listened to and they were downloaded as part of a discography. There are some albums which I have only listened to once or twice but I haven't deleted them in case I might want to listen to them again sometime. Sometimes I don't download or buy cds for a couple of weeks to give myself a chance to listen to what I have, especially albums I haven't listened to in a while. There's no real point in having a huge library that you are never going to have the pleasure of hearing half of.

I used to download like that, and all it ever did was clog up my computer with years of stuff I would never power through. These days I've got downloading down to my own little science where ultimately, I'm only downloading 20 albums a week, and I can't get a fresh batch until I've finished with what I've got.

Under this method, I've never listened to so much in a year, or purchased so much. It used to be that I put music off because of how much I had on my computer. The routine makes it manageable for me.

I consider it a grand, noble journey of discovery. With a new computer, I spent the better part of a year downloading upwards of 100k songs and sifting through all the artists I already knew and rating what I knew/grew up with. Then I went on and finished respective discographies here and there, here and there while listening to new music and exploring unknown territory. At this point, I've got maybe 20k rated and I've really slowed down on downloading. I picked up 10-15 albums this summer tops. I'm still going through and rating my 'old' stuff and having a blast. It's such a great feeling to discover a band that you fall in love with, and you already have all their work.

I'm actually the complete opposite. I look at my library and wish I had more stuff. Well, stuff that I truly enjoy. I get albums that I kind of like, and they get old pretty quick. Back when I started broadening my horizons, I found all kinds of new genres that I liked and pretty much everything I found was new. Now that I know what I like, it's become a hell of a lot harder.

I went through a phase where I was acquiring so much obscure music so rapidly, which was a hobby I very much enjoyed, that I began feeling as though I hadn't paid my dues and heard enough of the "legendary", "famous" or "must hear before you die" type albums. I couldn't really hold up a conversation about music because all I was really into was archived vinyl type stuff from blogs and mainstream wise a few 90s Alternative bands. So I made the unfortunate decision to hold off on collecting/enjoying obscure records while I set out to hear the "greatest" albums of all time. I listened to quite a few of them, but what ended up happening is relegating them to a folder and never opening them again, save for a song coming on shuffle now and again.

I found I could never listen to all the music people "expected" me to have listened to, and went back to just listening to what I enjoy.

Now I have a fairly good size music collection made up of a lot of things I haven't heard, some of which still surprise me occasionally and I discover music without ever logging onto MB. :yeah:

I download a lot of music, but I justify it by assuring myself that music will not always be free in such a manner. The internet as a great frontier of unabashed freedom to upload and share and download whatever you want is something I just don't feel is a sustainable model. I really do think that, at some point in the future, I will not be able to go and download CCR's discography on a whim, so what's the harm in acquiring it now? I keep everything neat and tidy, and I listen to most of it. I have plenty of hard drive space, too.

Also, bear in mind that due to the digital format music has evolved into, the music collections we are creating now will be with us for the rest of our lives. That's a pretty significant motivator for me to acquire as much of it as I please.

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.

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.

What kind of stuff?

Computer crashes.

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

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

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.)

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.

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.

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.

Brilliant, yes, I'm glad you brought that up. And before I start, I'm glad someone else shares some sentiments with me. It may or may not be irrational, but I also feel the need off and on to preserve music. I remember at one point thinking to myself, before I realized the scope, that I would try to download everything. I would have every album by any and every band that I considered enjoyable (that alone I try to keep up with, but is still hard) plus a smorgasbord of 'classics' of genres I don't listen to that I ... might in the future (Let me go download butt loads of Hawaiian music, Celtic music, movie score-type music, flamenco, ). That's insane (for now). Until I can have 100+ TBs, and a download speed that exceeds 4 MB (or should I say, at least averages 4 if not exceeds), this can't be. But I reckoned I wanted to be familiar with and have access to all forms of media...

Nice collection by the way. I've gotten about 100k in 5 years, but I'm at my ceiling. Filled my space up, got about 5 Gigs left I use to grab new stuff, and if I keep it, I delete a movie or something. It's a buzzkill for me to have to pick and choose what to keep. I want to hoard all music, all movies, all tv shows. It's just not a reality (yet).

Imagine meeting someone and they ask you if you have <something> and you're like... "Oh yea. I don't know who they are/what it is, but I got em/it. Enjoy!" I think I wouldn't feel this way if things were faster overall. I just want instant, reliable access to all media without needing internet. The internet suffices in the meantime.

The point is to have access to something if I want it.

Sure, I may not listen to everything I get, but in that one instant where I'm like, "Oh, hey, that group! I have their stuff, I'll listen to it now!" I want access to it. I don't want to wait around while I acquire a copy somewhere else. I want the copy NOW, with me, so I can use it at my leisure.

Media technology.

I have 3 folders.

-Music I like and I frequently hear.
-Music I liked, but heard so many times that I'm got bored.
-Music I heard once and didn't want to hear again. It's only usefulness is to check if I already watched it, but I may replace it with a database some day.

I think he was suggesting the digital age will stay around for a long time to come, even if the media we equip it on changes over time.

When first starting out dowloading most people just d/l anything and everything because they can, then they get bored and slow down and start to get picky about what they download, this is what I see happening with most posters on this thread, myself included.

I keep my collection off the PC on a NAS server wit 2 mirrored drives so if one crashes I just have to put another disk in. I am contemplating a 3rd drive to keep on the shelf in case the box crashes and at way under $100 it's worth it.

I understand, but what I was suggesting is that the direction it will take is impossible to predict. Who's to say ten years from now the software to play our audio files will simply be no longer available.

I knew there was a reason I saved all those 8-tracks.

I've been at this mess for ten years, and my rate of consumption only seems to increase as time goes on. I'm pretty sure this is just my form of drug addiction, aha.

I'm going to be doing this as soon as I have the capital to put the server together (along with a new pc).

you guys could use 5 of these
Newegg.ca - SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4EG HD155UI 1.5TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

But that doesn't really make sense. It's not like the MP3 file can become unusably outdated in our lifetimes.

Who knows what ridiculous copyright laws might be enacted to "protect" [money of the] "artists" (record companies). I would not be surprised if mp3's became unplayable unless tagged with some kind of "legally purchased" stamp.

It might happen, but I'm going to tender a guess and say that it could be broken.

Just like how DRM encryption (which was in vogue a few years ago on "free" media players) were supposed to blockade certain free web-based content from permanent acquisition. Simple, right? Strip the encryption off and use third-party software to transfer the media. Then it actually turns out to be a pretty awesome find; that's how I got exposed to Elliott Smith.

Why would you think that? I have files from the late 90s that are already pretty much inaccessible to me, give it another decade or two and they'll most definitely be completely out of reach. I see no reason to think that kind of thing won't continue in the future.

i try to listen to every album that I download

i don't have time for repeat listens much, though, if i don't really like the albums

I find myself listening for at least one play through and then I will gravitate to one or two singles that I really enjoyed and play those death.

I feel like I've gone back to being more of a singles listener more than albums.

i think the only thing that downloading music has given me is severe music ADD

For a music lover I have a shocking lack of albums in my library. If there's a song on my iPod, I know it very well. I tend to download an album and really listen to it before moving onto another. I think there must be a happy medium somewhere between my pitiful amount of music and having tens of thousands of tracks, but my obsessive nature stops me from really getting a massive collection.

Habitually downloading music
 

There was a time in my life when I bought a cheap mp3 player. Instead of downloading albums (I had no choice) I bought them. I only had enough money to buy an album once a week. Every time I bought an album I would listen to it as much as possible. My headphones sucked and the quality was bad but I enjoyed the music that I had. When I bought "Revolver" by the Beatles I listened to it 22-28 times in that week alone.

When I got the internet I would download albums that would get me into other genres of music. I listened to everyone. I have 88 albums in my Cowon X7 (160 GB :p:) since 2009. I will keep downloading music, but there's no chance I'm keeping an album that I won't listen to.

I think when it comes to collecting music downloading is the equivalent of crack.