Do you own your turn-of-the-millenium CDs...
OR DO YOUR TURN-OF-THE-MILLENIUM CD'S OWN YOU?
I had a bad boss who gave me good advice: "If you've got stuff in a box, and a year later the box is unopened and covered with dust, throw the whole thing it out. You don't need it, you haven't thought about it, and you won't miss it."
I've been getting rid of a lot of stuff lately. The square footage of my living spaces has been steadily decreasing over the last 10 years. I don't mind smaller living spaces (my freshman year college dorm room was 6' x 8', and I kind of loved it). The laborious part is that every move requires me to dispense with the acquired clutter from the previous living space. The dust-covered, unopened boxes, in other words.
I am currently attempting to empty a storage unit, figuring out what to do with the hundreds of CD's I have acquired since the 1990's. My collection begins with the CD single for They Might Be Giants' "Istanbul, Not Constantinople." I purchased this before I even had a CD player, because this was my absolute favorite band, and, in small-town Delaware in the 90's, finding the CD single felt special and rare.
Should I keep it? It's a keepsake of a certain time in my life. But, I haven't felt the need to listen to the other tracks on the “maxi-single” in 20 years. "Stormy Pinkness" is a great song. But do I need it to take up physical space in my apartment?
After all, it's right here on YouTube! And Spotify, and Apple Music, and all those other streaming services that stipulate that we don't actually own the music in any way, least of all physical - we pay (steadily increasing) monthly fees for the privilege of listening to the tracks stored on their servers. Tracks which will disappear for you as soon as you stop paying. Or as soon as licensing issues, copyright issues, or an executive's whim take the media off the servers and make it unavailable to everyone.
I've been seeing some videos on social media recommending that we save all of our physical media now, because the future is very uncertain, and the streaming digital media providers owe us nothing.
I'm trying to save some CDs, but only the CDs that are worth saving.
Right now my process is:
Decide if it's a special CD worth keeping or not
If it’s not worth keeping, scan the CD barcode into DeCluttr and see how many cents they will give me for the CD (yes, cents)
If DeCluttr offers anything higher than $.65, the CD is probably worth at least $20 on eBay, so I set it aside to sell on eBay
Everything else goes into the trash
I have a lot of "everything else." I acquired a lot of CD's, partly because I love music (obviously) and I love hearing new music. Also, at that point in my musical development, I thought that listening was learning.
Listening is definitely part of learning. But now, with years of making music under my belt, I realize listening and working with what I'm listening to yields exponentially greater results.
"Working with a song" can mean anything. Obviously it can mean transcribing it or learning to play the melody and/or chords on your instrument. But you can also learn a lot by jotting down the music’s overall structure and even translating the sound into a graphic score.
Digging deeper into the music I love by analyzing makes the time I spend with each CD more precious and more vaulable.
(Of course, listening to music for enjoyment without analyzing it is totally ok also).
Current noise-making:
You Wouldn't Unring a Bell - a #disquietjunto prompt to create some music "in which you try to unring a bell." I had a blast making this, and I think it was a success.
Current woodshedding:
Theem Prototype by Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes - as mentioned above, I learned a lot by analyzing the overall structure of this track. I love how Gendel creates a hypnotic, engrossing sound world by alternating between and embellishing on just two melodic ideas:
Current listening:
Spider Groove by Robert Logan - Logan is new to me, but I love how he balances accessible elements with really unpredictable sounds. This track in particular makes me visualize a horror movie set in Lovecraftian ruins on an alien planet...
So, how about you? Do you still have every CD from your teenage years? Are you streaming-only? How do you decide what to keep and get rid of?