A Year of Music

I know some music nerds who seem to live to amass a hoard. They, like me, have stacks of CDs covering every flat surface, and connive to find ways to fit more CDs into more places in their houses. Most of them share a problem in common, and that problem is one I try very hard to avoid: they’ve lost track of what they’ve acquired, and it’s entirely likely they have a big pile of music scattered around that they’ve never heard.

That sort of thing makes me itch. Music is a thing to hear and to experience, not to collect and sit on like Smaug, the greedy dragon from The Hobbit, was with his stolen gold. Since I’m not a professional critic, I pay for my music myself, and music claims the biggest share of my disposable income. If I buy music, I want to get my money’s worth out of it.

One of the most useful side effects of ripping my entire CD collection was that it gave me tools for tracking information about what, when and where I buy music, and helps me make sure that I actually hear everything I buy. I make heavy use of iTunes’ smart playlists to help me give equal time to my collection, and one of the main things that drove me to upgrade to a new MacBook Pro was that iTunes was getting so bogged down in dealing with the hundreds of playlists I’ve created that it was taking minutes (literally) to do trivial tasks, and syncing my iPod was taking half an hour each time.

These tools come with their own problems, though, which is that periodically I get overwhelmed by buying too much new music at once. It happens. I don’t really have a list of new releases I want, because for at least the last ten years I can walk into and out of a record store in under a half hour having spent an uncomfortable amount of money and not having to look too hard to find a big pile of stuff I absolutely must have right now. As I gradually make the transition to buying music online, resisting the temptation of immediate gratification only gets harder.

So last year I came up with a solution to the problem, which was yet another set of smart playlists that I used to create a music budget. Capping my spending on music isn’t really a concern to me, at least right now: I’ve got a good job, no car and few vices aside from music shopping. No, really it was about trying to make sure that I wasn’t buying more music than I could get to know. After looking at my listening habits over time (something for which last.fm is extremely helpful), I decided about 24 hours a month was a good cap.

The idea is a good one, and it’s definitely helped, but I’ve also blown the budget more often than not (I’ve also come in way under budget a few months, in part to balance out the months where I get out of hand).

It is my sad duty to report to the world at large that January 2008 was not a good one for my music budget, as I added, um, 3.5 days’ worth of new music to my iPod. Oops. Even after last night’s Amazon & Interpunk orgy, I ended up downloading these releases from Bleep and Boomkat after Bleep suddenly fixed my Clark order:

• Clark: Throttle Promoter (Warp)
• Amon Tobin: Kitchen Sink: Remixes (Ninja Tune)
• Autechre: Untilted (Warp)
• Autechre: Draft 7.30 (Warp)
• Autechre: Quaristice (Warp)
• KTL: KTL 3 (Mego)
• Æthenor: Deep in Ocean Sunk the Lamp of Light (vhf)

For somebody who used to claim he didn’t like Sunn(((O))))) very much, I sure do have a lot of their side projects. And now my Autechre collection is complete again. But either way, I’m sort of hoping I can ease up for a month or two, both so I can assimilate all the new stuff I’ve gotten, and so I can make some progress in listening through my collection, which is what I’m supposed to be doing for this blog.