What Proportion of Your Music Collection Did You Play...

Last week? Last month? Last year?

I have a thousand CDs (give or take) and of course many thousands available via Qobuz.

Suppose I listen for four hours a day - these days that's four to six albums. Twenty-eight to forty-two a week. Say thirty-five a week, or 1,820 a year. Some of that is going to be "new music" from the streaming service. I'd say around five a week or 260 a year.

I have not kept records, but I reckon on any given day, I will be choosing from a pool of about 150 albums or artists from the last two or three months' listening. I reckon I listen to about 300 different albums a year. Not new albums: all albums. Another way of saying that is that I listen to each album six times a year, or once every eight weeks or so. Half of those albums will be streamed.

So why do I need 1,000 CDs in boxes cluttering up my Kallax units? As for the books in the same units, I haven't read most of them a second time.

This is where the minimalist / maximalist thing comes in.

Maximalists love yards of shelves reaching to the ceiling, loaded with LPs, books, CDs, magazines and anything else. It's a record of their life and how it has changed, as well as how much continuity it has. Maximalists live in a present suffused with the past.

Minimalists be like: do I really need to be reminded of something I'm never going to play or read again? It was of its time, and that time has passed. Minimalists live in the now and the past only exists insofar as now reaches back for it.

I'm pretty much a minimalist. Also, I live in a small terraced house and I don't have a lot of room for what amounts to an archive. So it's time to move stuff in and out of archive. (The archive is a bunch of shelves in the box room.) Also, if it's in the archive, I don't need to feel guilty for not playing it.

Staying

My CDs fall into a number of groups:

Miles Davis 

Other Jazz 

Rock / pop / folk / flamenco 

EDM 

Plainchant / early choral music 

Bach

Other Baroque 

Contemporary avant-garde 

Other "classical" (inc Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler etc) 

String Quartets (good for working first thing in the morning while under headphones)

I haven't listened to the early Church music for a long while now. It was a period I went through. The same goes for the contemporary avant-garde stuff. Chalk that up to education.

Miles is staying. The jazz is staying. So is the Baroque, Bach and Handel. Probably the "other classical" as well. I'm never going to play Second Best In the Infants at home because it's just too loud, even if played quietly. It's train music. But I am going to play the less in-your-face EDM I have on CD (not a lot, a chunk of it was bought as train music from Amazon). The rest can go into the archive, until the day I think that I could just do with a blast of Luciano Berio.

Archiving