How much physical music (CDs, vinyl, minidiscs, cases ingles, whatever) have you bought so far this year?

Sadly there's literally only HMV, an Oxfam specialising in msuic, film, and books, and a solitary independent / second-hand shop catering exclusively for Mojo readers left in Exeter now.

I think I've bought about 15 CDs at 10 12"s from MVE this year. Nothing remotely new either. I'm having a weird year with muisc; even though I work 55-60 hours a week in shops that let me play whatever I want, most of the time I'm spinning the same few podcasts/albums, despite this being a year when I could, if I could be bothered, really indulge in hearing as much new stuff/doing as much cratedigging as possible. And aisde from the stuff I've had to review, I don't think I could name you more than five albums I'd actually want to listen to from this year right now.

so, if its allowed, can we have a very brief thread-detour where you tell me what I should be listening to from this year now that I'm at work. Will listen to whatever the first suggestion is. And reeprt back.

Swans.

To test out if you really can play ANYTHING.

Haha, that's one of the ones I've already played down here - turned out that my boss used to be a big fan of them!

Probably only bought about 10 or so new releases on CD so far. Kind of low really, normally I buy around 30-40 new albums a year but I think I also buy more stuff towards the end of the year when I accept that some things will never be up on Spotify or eMusic or whatever so I just buy it on CD unheard. I have bought a fair wodge of back catalogue and reissues though, plus a shitload of digital too.

New CD and vinyl, 100+.

Hazard of working in a record store.

Somewhere between 40-50 CD albums, all from 2012. Most I listened to on Spotify first unless they were follow-ups to albums I loved or Spotify wasn't an option. I probably buy about 1/4 of the new albums I listen to on Spotify. If I don't like them enough to buy I'll listen only once or twice.

A conservative 7-10, but that includes a spree in which certain items were heavily reduced. The nearest record shop to me is a town away. I went there on Friday to watch Last Shop Standing and the author gave a talk http://lastshopstanding.com/. It was fairly interesting, and I was moved into making a point of shopping from independent outlets in future if I can. I'm starting to believe that the death of the physical format is quite a dangerous thing because it means the death of the record shop. Whilst researching a piece about my local music scene, it became apparent how important record shops were in their day; not just as outlets but communal hubs. Much of the early rave scene was organised through a network of record shops in and around the Home Counties. Two Bad Mice and Omni Trio produced their biggest tracks in the backroom of a now defunct dance specialist in Hitchin. They were also places where kids would go in their lunch hour to spend pocket money, pick up flyers and hear new tunes.

And yeah, now we have the internet and YouTube and stuff, but a thousand kids sat behind a thousand computer screens isn't the same as a chance encounter in a record store. Purchasing music online is very different from in a shop - there's less chance of buying something "on a whim" for a start, but really it's the communal aspect that concerns me more. Instead of going to your mate's from the shop with a record or CD in your bag you can't wait to show them. When people come over to listen to music, suddenly there's no album cover to skin up on and look at. Music listening has become very insular - suddenly everyone's listening to their own thing on their own iPod with its hegemonic list of artists and albums. The sharing aspect, the whole "hey man what's this, can we listen to it?" factor only exists through Spotify playlists. Many are going to argue and say I'm being a luddite about it - I do love digital, I love having my record collection in one contained space - but I also miss flicking through CD racks looking for something interesting to listen to, or marvelling at weird and wonderful things on other people's shelves, or reading an inlay cover, or looking at an awesome album cover, or bonding with someone in a record shop who just bought your favourite album. This is an essential part of being a music fan, for me and many other people, and if we lose that I think a younger generation will grow up wondering why their parents used to put so much value on listening to music.

My problem with buying CDs these days is that I tend to take it home, rip it and then plonk it on a shelf where it gathers dust, taking up space and never getting played. Think I'm going to switch to buying a vinyl record with download included at least once a month.

I haven't bought physical music product since mid-2007. I buy quite a bit of music via amazon mp3 or itunes. not sure how much off the top of my head.

I've had all the arguments and discussions and understand thoroughly all the plus points and so on and so forth and it still absolutely baffles me that people who are big music geeks can have not bought a phsyical music product in YEARS. I just can't ever imagine not doing it.

I've been on a panel with Graham Jones, author of Last Shop Standing. Enormously likeable guy. DL, I can tell that you've fallen under his influence - but he's such a dedicated and passionate advocate of independent record stores, that it's impossible not to!

I almost never buy digital, by the way. Only as a last resort.

Like yesterday I cycled to physio first thing and made a 10-minute detour via HMV so I could pick up the Flying Lotus CD. Today I had Swans and Janelle Monae CDs arrive from Amazon. On Sunday I pre-ordered the Daphni CD.

(the Daphni record is SO good btw)

I buy the odd track digitally (generally b-sides, old singles, one-off tracks I want where I'm not interested in the whole album), or maybe a whole EP if I can't get it on CD - Owen Pallett, Antlers. Moving house might encourage more vinyl-buying as we'll be able to keep it in the same room as the record player, thus it might get used. I occasionally download an album nefariously, but 80% of the time I'll then buy it on CD too.

moving house is what completely killed any desire on my part to own physical music again. my dislike of physical objects grows immensely every time i do it.

I guess moving often would be a complete hassle, but we've been in the current place for 5 years, and anticipate being in the next for 7+.

I haven't even owned a CD player other than my laptop's disc drive in a couple of years. After my whole CD collection got stolen a few years ago, I decided I was done with the format.

If I did buy CDs, I'd really have no use for them other than ripping them to mp3 anyway.

moved house at the weekend and tho my new place is great i am in full agreement with lex, must rip and discard my cds, if only i cd happily do the same thing with books

I've bought at least one item a week on average, mostly CDs but some vinyl, a mixture of new and second hand. The majority of the "new" items will be reissues and compilations. When I have more time I will aim to estimate the total number so I can do the poll.

I do question why I continue buying CDs, as even after I've bought them, I'm still more likely to use Spotify for listening to them. (Through the iPhone app and into a DAC via Bluetooth - sound quality is every bit as good as CD.) CDs don't scrobble, that's their problem. Reasons why I continue: 1) no digital music in the car, 2) residual product fetishism, 3) residual "collector" mentality, 4) offline backup, 5) digital purchases still don't feel fully "owned", 6) adequate recompense to the artist. Of these, 6) is the clincher.

moving house is what completely killed any desire on my part to own physical music again. my dislike of physical objects grows immensely every time i do it.

― lex pretend, Tuesday, 2 October 2012 10:37 (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, it got to the point where I realised I had an entire wall of music in variously sized units that was just taking up room. When it came to moving there was literally no way of housing them comfortably in the new place (and besides my cuntflap housemates of the time had taken to using my CD inlays as speed-wraps. I could KILL!) Many of the CDs were rips or secondhand things so the resell value wouldn't have outweighed the time and cost of selling them online, so I picked the ones that were important to me, phoned friends and told them to take however many they wanted. I rarely feel as though this was a bad idea as at least I know they've gone on to happy homes.

The remainder of my CD collection (which is still fairly big by most people's standards) currently sits behind a sofa in the spare room. Still, I sometimes glance at it and my eye picks out the spine of an album - usually one I'd just forgotten to play in a long time as it's squirrelled away in the depths of my hard drive - and I think to myself "I should give that another spin some time soon". This is testament to the physical format really. I have so much digital music now that my brain is ultimately accustomed to seeing certain folders in certain places and therefore skips and neglects them. So I always just scroll past, say, the Smashing Pumpkins folder, never thinking about whether or not I'd like to play anything from them. I forget that I used to really enjoy tracks off of Mellon Collie and how jarring I found it when they released Adore. Their entire career is reduced to a folder on my hard drive labelled "smashing pumpkins" and so I scroll through.

I'm intrigued, Mike, by your mention of that fact that "CDs don't scrobble"; why is being able to scrobble important to you? (And is scrobble in the OED yet? It should be.)

I've been on a panel with Graham Jones, author of Last Shop Standing. Enormously likeable guy. DL, I can tell that you've fallen under his influence - but he's such a dedicated and passionate advocate of independent record stores, that it's impossible not to!

Yeah he seemed like a really nice bloke. He did a Q&A along with the shop staff which ended up getting kind of heated! Think the bit that affected me most was how at the end he explained that two of the shops in the documentary had had to close down since it was filmed, and that one of the owners was now living with his sister having lost his entire livelihood.

I dread to think, but it's probably close to, if not over 100 records. I'm actually trying to cut down the size of my collection, not expand it so I'm not really sure how it happened. A couple of times I sorted though cheap bins and bought about 20 for a pound or so which has pushed it up and most of those have been gambles which haven't made the cut.

I've probably sold 40-50 old records on Discogs this year too.

iPhone doesn't scrobble either these days. At least mine hasn't for at least a year. I do like Last.FM but it has so many flaws that it doesn't work as well as it should. It would be great to make it that bit less buggy and more communal.

Right, read the thread properly now, I'd say new or reissues, I've bought maybe 30 12" singles and around 5-10 lps. A few of those may have been bootlegs though, or at the very least sketchy licensing so the money may not have ended up in the artists pocket.

Think I've probably bought about 30 albums this year which is less than usual as we moved house and I was trying to cut down a bit.

Of those 30, I estimate at least half still have their cellophane wrappers on as they were albums I'd already downloaded when they leaked.

Why is being able to scrobble important to you?

I like having a record of what I've listened to, and how often. Mmm, stats. I particularly like having rolling "most played tracks over past 3/6/12 months" counts.

I hate stats.

If Scrobble actually worked properly for me it'd be great for EOY lists

I play albums on CD in my CD player and also play them (silently) on Spotify so that they scrobble. Also that way I'm contributing the tiny amount of money on top of whatever they got from my CD purchase.

22 new albums including two boxed sets - nearly all CDs, the only records I've bought new this year have been reissues of older stuff. I prefer buying vinyl but new releases can be too pricey a lot of the time.

It'd be 100+ if we were counting secondhand purchases, I've bought a lot of cheap old stuff on both CD and vinyl.

I've pretty much given up with EOY singles / tracks lists, as who knows what's actually a single anymore, and they'd be a zillion songs long.

As for EOY albums, I keep all new purchases separate from the rest of the collection, as a very visual reminder / guide to what I've bought this year (both new stuff and back catalogue). I filter everything into the stacks on New Years Day; done this for a few years now, and much prefer it to keeping a list anywhere or trying to remember by going through everything. Also gives me a default 'what to listen to niow' pile for when I'm feeling indecisive.

My digital collection gets a new folder every time I buy a bigger hard drive. I'm not sure what the logic to doing this is, other than it categorises it into new/old/very old. This does stop me going back and listening to stuff from a few years ago though, and I've found that the time I take listening to new music now far outweighs older stuff whereas before it would have been split pretty evenly.

I play albums on CD in my CD player and also play them (silently) on Spotify so that they scrobble.

I have been known to do this, yes. Ahem.

In place of a physical listening pile, I have a "favourite 2012 albums" Spotify playlist and a matching spreadsheet, held on Dropbox and permanently open on the laptop. Neither distinguishes between owned and unowned. (Well, OK, there's colour coding on the spreadsheet. Let's not delve too deeply into my mania.) I do miss the visual artwork cues, but it's a more level playing field.

There's one additional bit of insanity which MUST STOP: ripping purchased CDs to iTunes, when they're already on Spotify. An utterly pointless waste of time and disk space.

Isn't Spotify streaming lower quality than CD rip?

Depends how you rip your CDs.

xps I guess you get better quality from a rip unless you have Spotify Premium.

I don't think I'll ever get on board with Spotify.

No, the "extreme" setting on the app equates to 320kpbs. Through a DAC, there's no discernible difference with the CD, let alone the rip.

by a very long distance the least in a couple of decades - about 18 new CDs (inc doubles and triples) and a few music DVDs.

this has been mostly deliberate, because I still have things I bought in the '90s I've not listened to yet (have been gradually cutting down for five years on these grounds) and because I might be putting all my shit in storage for a year or so in 2013, and then finding a new place to live and unpacking it all again.

last night, at a gig, I bought an EP I've been wanting to buy for five years but have never seen a copy of before - that was the first purchase in three months.

Even though I've got rid of a lot of CDs over the past few years, I do like having a physical copy of the things I really like - I'm moving house in a month so there is the space factor but I like having objects if I'm attached to them and they're nice to look at. I bought an OOIOO CD recently which has really great artwork for example, I've also picked up some of those Miles Davis boxed sets used and they're so beautifully made, I don't mind shelling out extra for things like that.

Buying music digitally is great for singles though, I keep a work-in-progress playlist of my favourites for each year. I'd miss so much great new music if I only paid attention to albums.

Zero. CDs and CD boxes are kind of horrible physical objects anyway, especially once you've had them for a while, and they don't display well, and the last few CDs I bought I ended up digitising straight away anyway. Never had a turntable.

I still have trouble thinking of CDs as "physical music" rather than just another way of storing electronic data. Outside of vinyl, music just isn't a physical artefact.

about twenty CD's, most recently Dwight Yoakam's latest. I don't ever rip the whole CD to my iPod though: at most six or so tracks.

because it's so bad no burglar would steal it? ;)

A burglar did steal all of my CDs and tapes the summer between high school and college when I was in Germany and my parents' insurance policy replaced 95% of everything; basically anything they could find, they got me a copy of. (It helped that I had a database of all of the music I owned at the time.) So really, I'm not losing anything that isn't out of print even in a fire. (note to self: restart that music collection database)

If my records got stolen, there is no way I would use the insurance money to replace half the same stuff.

The policy didn't give a lump sum, apparently.

Oh. I know nothing about how insurance works.

i bought some vinyl records. let's say...10 records.

I bought 95 CDs (or full-album downloads). Of those, 25 were boxes or sets of more than 2 discs.

is anyone else finding themselves buying more CDs lately? it's often cheaper than buying the download now

Biggest thing I bought this year: Cannibal Corpse's Dead Human Collection: 25 Years of Death Metal. 13 CDs (their entire studio discography to date, plus a new live album), 1 LP (said live album), a calendar, and 12" x 12" prints of all their album covers. You know, for hanging up in your living room.

I like Amazon's "AutoRip" service - buy the CD, get an instant free download.

CD albums: 300+ (about 80% new releases/20% catalog)
Vinyl LPs: 12 (all catalog, used)
12" singles: 0
7" singles: 1
Cassettes: 0

As for downloads:
Standalone tracks: 2 or 3
Single/EP bundles: 4-5 (all new releases)
Albums: 5 or 6 (all new releases)

I like Amazon's "AutoRip" service - buy the CD, get an instant free download.

Sometimes the CD+Download is cheaper than the Download

my discogs account reports that i bought about 110 or so records this year. most of those were used, but maybe 10 or so were new.

is anyone else finding themselves buying more CDs lately? it's often cheaper than buying the download now

Especially given how common budget boxsets are now. I picked up a few of those this year (Slowdive, Fields of the Nephilim, Thin Lizzy), and lots of used CDs. I probably bought about 100 CDs, more than ever before.

At this point I would not care if "physical" music were to just disappear altogether but the idea of the same thing happening to physical books horrifies me. Probably something to do with with physical music formats being a brief historical anomaly that we just happened to coincide with.

Like we installed a power amp and a massive pair of speakers at the end and I ended up playing the same album on both CD and streamed MP3 and the difference was pretty much imperceptible.

the new low priced outboard USB DACs like the Dragonfly and Nuforce are pretty amazing, if you listen to music on headphones a lot you should totally get one

is anyone else finding themselves buying more CDs lately? it's often cheaper than buying the download now

Especially given how common budget boxsets are now. I picked up a few of those this year (Slowdive, Fields of the Nephilim, Thin Lizzy), and lots of used CDs. I probably bought about 100 CDs, more than ever before.

this is me.

bargain bins + lots of budget boxsets (simple minds, roxy music, bread, j&mc, byrds, nephilim, janis joplin, neil young, International DeeJay Gigolos vol 1-5, the doors, scott walker, Philadelphia International Records: The 40th Anniversary Box Set, green day, 10cc !)

was looking for some decent box sets to round off the year. picked up the cheap 5cd bauhaus thing and the berlin period bowie box (zeit) but haven't seen any others that i liked...

How many English did you marry this year

i have bought 10 CDs this year. i mainly listen to new things via Spotify.

just bought a physical copy of K Michelle.

none? i think?

Think I bought a single CD, at a show.

I can't remember if I bought it before or after my earlier posts in this thread, but I just got another one of those "Original Album Collection" 5CD boxes (this is my sixth) from Amazon. This one has Dwight Yoakam's first five albums.

I got one of the Real Gone CD set of 19 Art Blakey records. Pretty much only listened to that for half the year.

I tallied everything up and got these results: I acquired 33 CDs, 31 LPs and got a box of 15 cassettes for free. Quite surprised that the total was as high as 79.

Zero, I'm pretty sure.

no comment

49 new, 21 old CDs.

I bought a used promo copy of a Howling Hex album for $1 the other day, so that makes 1 CD this year, while proving that Drag City was right to stay off of Spotify.

comment:

so so much. so so much more than i want to admit or can excuse. a couple hundred LPs, more than half of them new. 40 or 50 cds. 2 45s and 2 cassette tapes.

a quick guess: ~20 CDs, 2 LPs, £50 worth of downloads and 12 months of Spotify subscription

oh yeah, maybe $50 in downloads and half a year's spotify

Can we conclude anything from this thread? We're a subset of rabid music fans and many respondants said they didn't spend any money aside from streaming services. Has your appetite for music been sated? Do you still have a want-list? Personally, I have an "I might buy it" list but I no longer have a "things to check out" list as digital sources have allowed me to catch up on it. ILM is most often my source of things I look into.

I probably bought 50 or so LPs. Used to buy a lot more before moving to New York, don't generally care for the record shopping here. This was the first year I ever bought used records online, and I did more ordering online for LPs in general than ever.