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

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.

xpost Yeah, CDs seem like a really obscure format now - a halfway house that suits little purpose. Like you say, no longer a pleasing physical artefact nor a satisfactory digital format. I'm surprised you (as a dancist) never had a turntable Matt. Do you DJ at all? I tend to find that, for dance music, I get frustrated with listening to individual single tracks (too many long intros and outros) and end up mixing them together using Acid Pro for a more cohesive listen.

Haven't bought any physical music this year but have probably spent about $1k on digital releases.

Rockist!

xpost.

Zero

Feeling kind of ashamed

Haha, rockist?

Making your singles-based genre into 'cohesive' album-like units!

or dj sets as they're known by us hardcore rock fans

Most of the digital purchases I've made this year = impossible to find in shops and/or on CD

i guess expecting a dance fan to own vinyl decks is like expecting a rock fan to own guitars...

Kind of a no brainier

40-60, mostly vinyl, mostly catalogue. Fewer CDs than I used to because I tend to preview albums on Spotify and download the best tracks. If an album's consistently good I'll still buy the CD or vinyl though. Because, in terms of music-buying generations, I am old.

20-40 - a good chunk of that was two raids on the classical section of Academy Records. I am kind of into CDs right now because listening to them on the boombox in the kitchen or in the room I use as my office is a real pleasure to me

I'd have DJ sets as analogous to gigs rather than albums...

father of three with no spare cash! probably only bought cds/7"s of friends' bands this year, so 2-6 maybe?

I'd have DJ sets as analogous to gigs rather than albums...

― comedy is unnatural and abhorrent (Scik Mouthy), Tuesday, 2 October 2012 12:29 (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nah, because dance fans listen to a lot more DJ mixes than rock fans listen to recordings of live gigs. The majority of dance singles are pretty much designed to be mixed together - I don't have the time or patience to listen to a 2 minute intro beat with gaps between the tracks when I'm listening to house music for example. Plus a lot of people I know who used to play out now spend their time DJing in their bedrooms just for the pleasure of enjoying music.

no idea but i'd guesstimate about 250 12" singles, 100 albums, 50 7" singles and 0 cds.

52 12"s
2 10"s
3 cds

All new vinyl should come with a digital download as standard these days. It's ridiculous to think that many don't.

about half of that new and half used from discogs

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.