why do we collect all this music?

[rostasi]

Buy! Buy! Buy! 'til you're 50.

then:

Sell! Sell! Sell! 'til you die!

[porcy62]

Why, to be buried with it, of course.

I myself fully intend on having a 1000-CD-changer system installed in my mausoleum... every six or seven weeks the attendant will bring in a new rotation. Finally, a chance to listen to my collection in peace!

I already thought about it but I dropped the idea. The point is that I couldn't find a safe way to kill all the slaves that build the mausoleum and someone who kill the killer of the slaves, and the killer of the killer of the slaves...ecc..

You will be at risk of forum's tomb raiders anyway.

[Tjazz]

Overtly playing on the addictive nature of music collecting, one of the used music stores in the Kansas City metro area is called Need More Discs.

The owner is actually a nice, down to earth guy. I don't think he was trying to suck addicts even deeper into their hellhole with the name of his store.

I've overheard some record store owners talk of their customers as addicts. The owners would talk about how they gave up collecting and only SELL. If they were to pick-out the gems, the customers wouldn't get anything.

[alocispepraluger102]

Overtly playing on the addictive nature of music collecting, one of the used music stores in the Kansas City metro area is called Need More Discs.

The owner is actually a nice, down to earth guy. I don't think he was trying to suck addicts even deeper into their hellhole with the name of his store.

I've overheard some record store owners talk of their customers as addicts. The owners would talk about how they gave up collecting and only SELL. If they were to pick-out the gems, the customers wouldn't get anything.

...almost, but not quite enough, to make one stop.

[JSngry]

Ok, not really.

[7/4]

Ok, not really.

Is that a remaster or just a reissue?

[JSngry]

Original vinyl LP record. My mom bought it back in the day & we're not even Catholic.

[Hot Ptah]

We sang "Dominique" from that album almost daily at my Catholic grade school in the 1964-65 school year.

[Hot Ptah]

Buy! Buy! Buy! 'til you're 50.

then:

Sell! Sell! Sell! 'til you die!

Hey! Hey! I'm over 50. I'm not ready to do that yet. What do you think, that 50 is OLD or something?

I can see it at age 90, though. When I am 90 I may feel quite differently.

[Hot Ptah]

Overtly playing on the addictive nature of music collecting, one of the used music stores in the Kansas City metro area is called Need More Discs.

The owner is actually a nice, down to earth guy. I don't think he was trying to suck addicts even deeper into their hellhole with the name of his store.

I've overheard some record store owners talk of their customers as addicts. The owners would talk about how they gave up collecting and only SELL. If they were to pick-out the gems, the customers wouldn't get anything.

I have also heard used record store owners refer to certain customers as "the pawers". The owners describe "the pawers" as people who simply MUST paw through bins or boxes of albums regularly.

One of the stores in Kansas City held a big discount sale, out in their garage area, of thousands of really marginal albums in all genres. 99 % of the albums would never sell to virtually anyone on earth. I asked the owner why he bothered. He said, "oh, the pawers will be here in droves. They'll buy some things."

[7/4]

Original vinyl LP record. My mom bought it back in the day & we're not even Catholic.

Oh...I thought maybe a new reissue would have extra tracks. Darn.

[Hot Ptah]

Original vinyl LP record. My mom bought it back in the day & we're not even Catholic.

Oh...I thought maybe a new reissue would have extra tracks. Darn.

Yes, I was hoping for some stripped down arrangements, some early acoustic demos recorded in the hallway at the convent.

[7/4]

Original vinyl LP record. My mom bought it back in the day & we're not even Catholic.

Oh...I thought maybe a new reissue would have extra tracks. Darn.

Yes, I was hoping for some stripped down arrangements, some early acoustic demos recorded in the hallway at the convent.

and some sleep overs with pillow fights.

[Alexander]

For me, at least, it is a matter of compulsion. Once I get a jones for a particular CD or artist, I literally cannot rest until I get what I'm after. I think about it all the time. I've even dreamt about it! It's nuts! A real sickness...

Lately, I've moved my entire collection (3000 + CDs) down to the basement so that I'm at least not looking at them all the time. Out of sight, hopefully out of mind (it also has the added bonus that my wife doesn't have to look at them all the time either, and it's freed up tons of room).

Careful they don't get mold.

The basement is very cool and very dry. Ideal, actually.

As Tom Petty once said, "Store it in a cool, dry place!"

Edited September 5, 2007 by Alexander

[Hot Ptah]

I keep mine in the dry basement too. It's better that way for an addict. The object of the addiction is best hidden away in a dark corner, where unsuspecting do-gooders are unlikely to come upon it, and feel compelled to intervene to save the addict. The addict can wallow in the mire of his addiction in peace, in a remote, black hole.

[alocispepraluger102]

I keep mine in the dry basement too. It's better that way for an addict. The object of the addiction is best hidden away in a dark corner, where unsuspecting do-gooders are unlikely to come upon it, and feel compelled to intervene to save the addict. The addict can wallow in the mire of his addiction in peace, in a remote, black hole.

..and those without basements?

[porcy62]

I keep mine in the dry basement too. It's better that way for an addict. The object of the addiction is best hidden away in a dark corner, where unsuspecting do-gooders are unlikely to come upon it, and feel compelled to intervene to save the addict. The addict can wallow in the mire of his addiction in peace, in a remote, black hole.

..and those without basements?

I use the basements for my other addictions: good wines and sadomasochist's sessions. No room for records.

And I call it "The Dungeon".

Edited September 5, 2007 by porcy62

[rostasi]

Buy! Buy! Buy! 'til you're 50.

then:

Sell! Sell! Sell! 'til you die!

Hey! Hey! I'm over 50. I'm not ready to do that yet. What do you think, that 50 is OLD or something?

I can see it at age 90, though. When I am 90 I may feel quite differently.

Well, I'm being 12.9% funny boy, but only that much 'cause I'm moving in that direction myself...sincerely so.

I'll be 49 next month and I'm already experimenting with various harddrive combos and ideas for keeping "soft" files and

stepping up the eBay selling again of the hard copies.

It's not physically messy 'round here, but I'm surrounded by all of this - what I'm beginning to see as - detritus.

No complaints from my sweetheart here at home about quantity - she knew who/what she was getting.

I'm just feeeeeling the weight of it all. It's gone from about 26 or 27K to about 32K titles in the past 9 years.

...and you realize that just building an add-on to the house or carting them to some external storage facility doesn't pare things down -

it just moves it out of sight. Ideally, it would be nice to get it down to what the Buddhists refer to as the "Ten Thousand Things."

Now if I could just somehow store all of these books and manuscripts on disc - short of scanning...

[AndrewHill]

There are other irrational, emotional aspects to some of my meaningless jazz CD purchases.

I like hanging out in used music stores. I enjoy the atmosphere of them. I like a good used book store too. I just feel happy being in them. Since I go to the same stores often, the owner and staff are familiar with me--sometimes they get to know me and we develop a type of commerce-corrupted friendship. In that circumstance, one can't repeatedly hang out there and buy nothing. On some of the visits at least, you have to buy something, even if it is not something you would objectively choose to buy otherwise.

I say commerce-corrupted friendships, because if the store disappeared, we'd never see each other again. In the context of my "good customer" status, we speak in a friendly way, and talk intelligently about music which is obscure to the general public. There's a certain amount of fun there--again, all ultimately based on the fact that I will be giving them money.

I also have my online "commerce-corrupted friendships." I have found a few regular ebay sellers of hard to find jazz CD gems. I follow their auctions all the time and bid on some things in most weeks. After years of doing that, these ebay sellers and I have exchanged many emails about the arrangements for the purchases, and have added exchanges of ideas on the artists and albums, and some personal notes. I would miss these people on some level if I stopped bidding on their auctions. I have never spoken to them or met them in person, but they are "friends" in some way.

So jazz CD purchases have provided some emotional, or phony emotional, experiences, which are pleasant. I have certainly bought more CDs than I otherwise would have because of this added component.

I imagine that some alcoholics keep drinking because they enjoy seeing the "ol' gang" at their favorite bar. If they started drinking Diet Cokes at the bar, or didn't go to the bar at all, they would lose those people from their lives.

I like going to used cd stores too for several reasons. One, it is a thrill to find a used cd that's been out of print for cheap. I especially have had excellent luck in the dollar bins, where the store clerks are not aware of what they have. For example, I found William Parker's 2cd set Peach Orchard with no flaws for a buck. I have also built a repore with the clerks to the point where they will hold incoming jazz cds behind the counter and let me have first dibs on them. They will also give me discounts on some of those items, for example, a store had Hutch's Total Eclipse for $15 and they knocked off $5 for me. And three, it beats buying cds new. I save money, and I can get pass those stupid stickers that they put all over the jewel boxes and so forth. That way, I feel I can justify buying as many cds as I do. I have shrewdly come up with a plan for the new cd purchases by putting them on my Christmas list and I let the wife buy those, then I don't have to explain to her througout the year why I'm spending so much money; I let her spend it!

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

In the days when I had only a couple of hundred LPs, I used to play the new ones far too much, and ended up learning them. I found that, if I'd learned an album, I might play it, but I'd ceased to listen to it. It also monopolised the time I had available for listening to music too much, so that I didn't have time to play old records. And neither outcome seemed to me, by the late sixties, to be what I wanted.

So I play most new albums about 20-30 times in the first year I have them; perhaps a handful the following year; once or twice thereafter (though there are exceptions, of course, in both ways). So I don't do what I see a lot of people here doing; playing a new album over and over for a short while. By listening to recent acquisitions at the weekend, I can absorb them adequately for me to get to know them, but not so well that I take them for granted. And so most of my collection gets on the player at least every couple of years. And if I upgrade an album in some way, the new version comes out to play quite a bit. There are only 35 albums I haven't listened to for over ten years and most of them are ones I keep for other reasons.

So:

a) I don't usually have a huge backlog (only when I buy a load of, usually African, music when I go away on hols);

b) the lack of a backlog means I'm always keen to get some new stuff.

I strongly suspect it is the big backlog of records either totally unplayed or played only one or twice that makes people think of buying records as an addiction. In those cases, well, perhaps it is.

Of course, I only have a small collection compared to some - 4110 albums as of today.

MG

[mjzee]

I have to put in my 2 cents on this topic. Why do we buy so much? Because when we listen to a lot of it, we feel wonderful. The great thing about jazz is it's also enriching - it's the kind of topic where the more you know and experience, the more you'll get out of the music. It's as much about deepening your knowledge as anything else.

One HUGE difference between an addiction like alcoholism and buying music (which I maintain is not an addiction) is that you drink a bottle once, and it's gone. Listen to an album, and it's still there fully intact, waiting to be heard again. If you were to listen to each album only once, it wouldn't take you that long to go through all of jazz history. So the question is, as porcy62 mentioned, the amount of time we have to listen to the music to the extent we want to.

An additional consideration with jazz is how often we buy titles because we may never see them again. This strains our budget, but we see it as an unpleasant choice we must make. Look at the recent Mosaic thread about The Jazz Piano - if it weren't being discontinued, we wouldn't have expressed such agita. Obviously, an alcoholic faces no such challenge: liquor will always be made, and if he can't get Chivas he'll settle for Thunderbird.

So I see our unease about jazz collecting as a result of two unalterable facts: The amount of great music that's out there (and that will give us pleasure), and how much money we can devote to collecting. If one doesn't have a lot of money to devote, it doesn't change the fact that the music's great. And if we buy to listen to it (even if at a later date), then we're enriching ourselves.

I've "solved" the challenge of listening to my collection by listening to virtually everything through the "Party Shuffle" feature of iTunes. Whatever it plays (right now it's Blue 7 by Sonny Rollins from Saxophone Colossus) is pretty wonderful, and I just don't think about all the music I have but am not listening to. I'll probably hear another wonderful track within 5 minutes.

[rostasi]

I've "solved" the challenge of listening to my collection by listening to virtually everything through the "Party Shuffle" feature of iTunes. Whatever it plays (right now it's Blue 7 by Sonny Rollins from Saxophone Colossus) is pretty wonderful, and I just don't think about all the music I have but am not listening to. I'll probably hear another wonderful track within 5 minutes.

I can certainly relate to this!

A technical note concerning "Party Shuffle":

I've noticed that if you have the display set to "0" for (not) showing the upcoming tunes,

every time that you add something new to iTunes,

each track is considered a possibility of coming up during shuffle play.

This differs from playing your tracks randomly outside of the "Party Shuffle" feature

where you have to actually turn the shuffle off and

then on before it'll consider the new songs that were added.

[montg]

I've "solved" the challenge of listening to my collection by listening to virtually everything through the "Party Shuffle" feature of iTunes. Whatever it plays (right now it's Blue 7 by Sonny Rollins from Saxophone Colossus) is pretty wonderful, and I just don't think about all the music I have but am not listening to. I'll probably hear another wonderful track within 5 minutes

This solution is working for me too. The portability of the ipod is wonderful. At work, in the kitchen, and so forth my collection is there...so I have a lot more listening time. I usually hook the ipod up to my little logitech docking station, and the sound is pretty good.

I still enjoy sitting in front of the hi fi at night and really listening, but the ipod has made my collection available virtually anywhere, anytime.

Still, threads like this motivate me to do some pruning. It's always hard to decide what to prune, but I guess if i haven't listened to a CD for 2 or 3 years, have no desire to listen to it or even download it on the ipod, and it has no apparent historical or personal value, it's time to bid farewell.

[medjuck]

Buy! Buy! Buy! 'til you're 50.

then:

Sell! Sell! Sell! 'til you die!

Hey! Hey! I'm over 50. I'm not ready to do that yet. What do you think, that 50 is OLD or something?

I can see it at age 90, though. When I am 90 I may feel quite differently.

Well, I'm being 12.9% funny boy, but only that much 'cause I'm moving in that direction myself...sincerely so.

I'll be 49 next month and I'm already experimenting with various harddrive combos and ideas for keeping "soft" files and

stepping up the eBay selling again of the hard copies.

It's not physically messy 'round here, but I'm surrounded by all of this - what I'm beginning to see as - detritus.

No complaints from my sweetheart here at home about quantity - she knew who/what she was getting.

I'm just feeeeeling the weight of it all. It's gone from about 26 or 27K to about 32K titles in the past 9 years.

...and you realize that just building an add-on to the house or carting them to some external storage facility doesn't pare things down -

it just moves it out of sight. Ideally, it would be nice to get it down to what the Buddhists refer to as the "Ten Thousand Things."

Now if I could just somehow store all of these books and manuscripts on disc - short of scanning...

32K!!?? Are we talking albums here?

[7/4]

One HUGE difference between an addiction like alcoholism and buying music (which I maintain is not an addiction)

Are you powerless over buying music? Is your life unmanageable?