In days gone by, my musical tastes and collection were an important part of how I defined myself, so even lightly culling my cd collection is no small decision, but yesterday I made a start - the first time, in many years of accumulating, that the collection is shrinking rather than growing.
Reasons, all relevant but from least to most important: (1) they take up space and are a pain to move, and I neither physically play nor display them (no space, or at least not enough space to prioritise cds), so they've just been sitting in boxes for years, lugged from rental to rental, all 10 archive boxes worth; (2) it's all on my computer/ipod nowadays, and plus thanks to the iTunes store, public libraries and more, my music 'collection' extends beyond the actual cds I own anyway; and (3) I guess these days my musical taste, or at least its expression through a collection, just isn't that big a part of my identity any more (wow).
Unlike books, which I'm always trying to whittle from my shelves, and for which I've developed a decent rubric about what merits hanging on to, I wasn't that sure where to draw the line and so I've wound up getting rid of really just the lowest-hanging fruit for now. Maybe a bolder scour is in the future; the really large move would be to get rid of the majority of the remaining ones and maybe only hold on to a hundred or so (maybe 200...) that have particular significance, but I'm not sure I'll ever get that far - mainly, at this stage, because I like the insurance of still having the physical copies in case something catastrophic ever happens to my hard drive rather than because I'm sentimental about the majority of them as physical artifacts - but who knows?
Anyway, for posterity:
Reasons, all relevant but from least to most important: (1) they take up space and are a pain to move, and I neither physically play nor display them (no space, or at least not enough space to prioritise cds), so they've just been sitting in boxes for years, lugged from rental to rental, all 10 archive boxes worth; (2) it's all on my computer/ipod nowadays, and plus thanks to the iTunes store, public libraries and more, my music 'collection' extends beyond the actual cds I own anyway; and (3) I guess these days my musical taste, or at least its expression through a collection, just isn't that big a part of my identity any more (wow).
Unlike books, which I'm always trying to whittle from my shelves, and for which I've developed a decent rubric about what merits hanging on to, I wasn't that sure where to draw the line and so I've wound up getting rid of really just the lowest-hanging fruit for now. Maybe a bolder scour is in the future; the really large move would be to get rid of the majority of the remaining ones and maybe only hold on to a hundred or so (maybe 200...) that have particular significance, but I'm not sure I'll ever get that far - mainly, at this stage, because I like the insurance of still having the physical copies in case something catastrophic ever happens to my hard drive rather than because I'm sentimental about the majority of them as physical artifacts - but who knows?
Anyway, for posterity:
