i dunno if i agree completely with reynolds that having too much music in mp3 form is as bad a thing as he seems to be saying
my own collection is too much (best part of a tb and shrinking) and fairly widespread in genre. when i realised that i was becoming a fairly serious downloader i kept it in mind that i would be sure to have a broad enough selection so that if i felt the need i could always have a new style or area to explore, basically to avoid over saturating myself with anything. obviously there are limits but i made a big effort with that. also it helped towards having a john peel meets gilles peterson meets theo parrish meets old school solid steel era coldcut who occasionally hang out with nurse with wound type radio station when i put the whole thing on shuffle
also there was the thought that maybe one day it would become impossible to download music or i would be living on a desert island and would need enough music to somehow stay sane
like reynolds, a large amount of it comes from album blogs, but unlike him i see it as having my own massive record shop where i can rummage through stuff and find shit at random. maybe the odds of quality are a little higher than an actual record shop due to the discernment of the bloggers i used to follow. well actually, the odds are higher, but there is still a lot of fodder to wade through, which only adds to the random record shop vibe of it. there were only a few bloggers who i followed which managed to stay consistently great, but there were like 50x more which were were only occasionally great and then the rest of the time just flogging pap with a convincing blurb to hoodwink you into believing they had just dropped the heaviest shit ever on you
at the moment i`m mostly listening to things on shuffle and occasionally i`ll hear something that makes me rush to the screen to see what it is. a lot of the time i will have forgotten what it was 2 songs later and in a way thats a good thing. a fleeting moment of excitement, maybe i won`t ever hear that song again?
the part where he talks about ipod shuffle basically equating to radio me kind of rang true there for a minute and i felt a pang of remorse. ages ago i half heartedly (due to the fucking mammoth task) started going through a few of the smaller genre folders and deleting tracks i`m certain i`ll never want to listen to again. thus being able to right click/play folder the genre (hiphop being one of them) and then having some assurance that 85% of what i`m going to hear is going to be pleasing to my ear. i realise i could have done this with playlists, but i never really got into them with winamp and i quite like windows explorer for navigating the folders. not into itunes at all
when i read his thoughts on it i first thought, `god, he`s right. i`ve taken the surprise and joy out of it.` but then i realised that if i wanted surprise i`d just tune into an actual radio station, of which there are plenty on and offline. i would like some control over what i listen to and i do still get joy from listening to the edited folders on shuffle (there`s enough there that i`m still coming across plenty of unfamiliar tracks)
it did raise one arguably interesting point when doing the hiphop deleting though, for my personal tastes, there just aren`t that many albums that i wanted to listen to all the way through. when i finished doing the hiphop folder i realized that there were only about 6 albums where i didn`t delete a single track and then a little over 15 more which were like 80-90% gold. so that kind of goes against the idea that we must listen to whole albums as the artist intended. i guess with hiphop though, it`s not as much an album type of genre as say, 70s rock. so maybe this point is moot? was strange to realise how many classic albums had some serious duds on them, too
the albums i usually do want to listen to all the way through tend to be the type of thing where a whole cohesive world is laid out in front of you that you can explore in your head as it plays along and it usually stays with you long after the fact. can`s tago mago for instance. a lot of instrumental music also fits the bill. and i guess a lot of music from the 60s&70s in genral does too
i agree that it`s a shame a lot of us barely have the patience to listen to a full track, and that people are losing the patience for proper listening, but in certain areas it`s just not really applicable. maybe i`m stating the obvious here, i dunno?
anyway, i think that as long as you are aware of what you are doing with your collection and not letting yourself become a skipper then i`d say the fact that so much music being available to us now is a wonderful thing