I have £16,000 worth of music. Would you like some too?
I’ve just procured a new hard drive to back up my music on to, because I’ve experienced a hard drive crash before and lost the whole of my precious music collection (and it is precious. I love music.). It was absolutely traumatic and I had to spend months getting hold of it all again. But that’s another story.
I have 308 gigabytes of music. That’s…
- 48,585 songs
- 20 weeks and three days worth if you played it all end-to-end.
(The average bitrate is 213 kpbs, if by some mad chance you’re interested in this.)
Let’s do some conservative estimation here. If we suppose that
- There are 20 songs on an album
- Your average album is worth about £7.50 in the shops (a bargain I must say)
- 10% of my collection is made up of duplicates (compilation albums etc)
I end up with 2186 albums worth a grand total of £16,395. Now that’s a hell of an investment. You can buy a DeLorean for less.
And this is even assuming you could buy all these in the shops. These aren’t just available albums; there are bootlegs, rare studio recordings from the thirties, albums that are impossible to find or buy, and albums that are worth far far more than £7.50.
I’ve probabaly listened to about 20 percent of all this. It’s great when most of your music library is an unexplored maze of interestingness; you can put the whole thing on shuffle and strange and wonderful things will pop out and assault your ears, things you never knew you had, things you never knew anyone had written.
(It’s almost painful thinking of all the songs in the world - not in my library, I mean- that I would absolutely adore if I heard them, that would move me and rock me, but which I will never hear simply because chance will not make me come across them.)
The genres of music I have are, roughly in order of size, my favourite types first:
- Heavy metal (seventies and eighties, thank you very much. And power metal. None of this Korn and Marilyn Manson rubbish.)
- Rock
- Folk (I love female folk singers with beautiful voices)
- The large mix of eclecticism that I suppose qualifies as Random Hippie Music
- Blues
- Trance (only if it’s nice, though)
- Classical
All of this lives on in a box about the size of a paperback book. And how much did I pay for it?
Absolutely nothing at all. £0.
There is a burning question that assaults my mind on a near daily basis.
Why in HELL are you still buying CDs?
There are many good points to the CD, such as the physicality, the durability, the integrity of the album, the lyrics, the artwork and the Interesting Comedy Footnotes in the booklet. But if you have a MP3 player you’re going to be digitalising everything anyway, and if you have a sensible nose for finance there is something dodgy about spending a tenner on a piece of plastic in a box.
And there are many bad points to digital music, such as the ethics furore and the ease with which you can lose it all. But the morals of copying music depends mainly on how much money artists make from gigging as opposed to album sales, and that’s a thorny one. And if you back everything up you’ll be absolutely fine.
But it’s easier and cheaper and if you love music it allows you to get hold of everything you dreamed you could own but could never afford. All that beautiful music you wish you could hear every day when it appears on the radio.
I got all my music by downloading it, for free, from the Internet.
There are many myths about this, including that it’s dangerous, will kill your computer, sounds horrible, and will get you arrested. They are all wrong.
Downloading music is completely safe and as easy as fucking strawberry pie. And in my next post I’ll be showing you the best technique in the world for doing it. Why don’t you build your own dream music collection?
