I’m a music collector, first and foremost. Like any collector, I have a tremendous wealth of items I picked up simply out of habit, items I’ve never really taken the time to appreciate. Over the past month I’ve been working on changing that.
Let me make it more concrete for you. I rocked Audiogalaxy and LimeWire back in high school, Direct Connect in college, and I figured out torrenting not too long after that. I’ve also worked at my share of radio stations over the years, and ripped everything I could get my hands on. All told, I’m currently in possession of just shy of 58 gigs of music, which makes a playlist that would take literally a full month to get through. Out of all that, only 13% of the tracks have play counts greater than zero. Not trying to start a math party over here, but the tl;dr is that I could delete about fifty gigs of music tonight and I’d never miss it.
Well, let me walk that back: I wouldn’t have missed it a month ago. I’ve made a point to go through my back catalog and listen to everything I own at least once, just to give it a chance to redeem itself. I’ve barely made a dent in my collection, which is a little embarrassing, but I’ve stumbled across so much great shit that I had NEVER EVER HEARD BEFORE, despite the fact that I HAD IT THE WHOLE TIME.
I imagine that in these postmodern times* you’re in much the same position. Look at your collection and prepare to be amazed by the sheer volume of stuff you’ve never bothered to listen to. Give it a shot, and tell me if you find anything amazing. In the meantime, here’s a couple of gems, new and old, that I rescued from the vast wasteland that is my iTunes library.
Halo Benders – “Bomb Shelter Pt 2″
William Elliott Whitmore – “Mutiny”
Wire – “Mekon Headman”
*You’re lucky I didn’t say “…in this post-9/11 world…”
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Comments ( 1 Comment )
Adam Morse added these pithy words on Aug 20 09 at 5:27 pmI’ve been doing the same thing now for about 8 months. I just keep dumping a gig at a time onto the ipod and letting it chill on shuffle. Discovreed Chad Vangaalen this way. That alone made the process worthwhile.
