I am(not really)a consumer whore. And how!

I know. I realize you're upset. I haven't posted a thing in days. You need your fix. I'm here. I've just been busy doing my thing. And by thing, I mean endlessly scour the internets for music. So at some point today, looking through blog after blog, I thought, well shit, I might as well update mine. I reached a milestone today. My iTunes now has exactly 10,000 songs in it. I've actually got more to import, but hitting that number and landing at 666 artists at the same time was too sweet to disrupt for a moment (this narrowly beats out the day I had 420 artists and 666 albums. It's the little things that excite me, isn't it?).

But the number actually freaked me out a bit. 10,000 songs? I suppose in the grand scheme of music it's not much at all. And I'm sure people have vastly larger libraries than I do, but that's not the point. It is a strange thing to ponder one's library. How did I accumulate all this stuff? What is it all? Do I really listen to all this? Of course, the answer to the last question, to be frank, is no. I definitely do not listen to all 28-and-change days of music stored on my hard drive. Then why do I have it all? For show? No, I really don't have that much of a vanity problem (a blog is enough). I think its just a compulsive thing for me now. I get bored, I look for music. Now this is the part where I admit that *gasp* I have not legally purchased all of this music. Not even the majority, most likely (RIAA please don't fuck me kthx). I do still buy music and support artists by going to shows, but this age is becoming noted for its extremely easy access to free, good music. If you know the hot spots, the ins-and-outs, tricks of the trade and whatnot, you can really find almost anything you want. In fact, it even becomes a sort of challenge for me. Can I find this album of obscure this-or-that? It's a fun game to play, and the rewards are great - a batch of fresh tunes to digest while you look for the next thing.

This process does become a bit overwhelming and hard to keep up. To help, I've been trying to alter my listening styles as of late. For a long time I was absorbed in keeping iTunes on Random. I know this is blasphemy to many, but I do enjoy it. Or at least I did. With a library now hurdling past 10,000 songs, a fair number of which I haven't listened to or even don't like, the concept of Random becomes daunting. Longs pauses between flipping through songs does not exactly make for great listening. So I have been embracing the album again. This isn't to say I didn't listen to albums before as well, it was just not really my main mode of listening. My problem has always been that when I want to listen to a full album, I tend to gravitate to the albums that I already know I enjoy listening to. Not really a bad thing per se, it just makes me a creature of habit and makes it more difficult to get into new music. Take for instance, the new Dirty Projectors record Rise Above. I had heard of DP around (they played Hampshire last year but I was uh, unable to go) and was especially interested when I found out their album was a "re-imagining" of Black Flag's record Damaged, and by their appearance on the video blog The Take Away Show. So I got the album and listened to a song here and there. And then another song here and there. It wasn't until probably two or three weeks of listening to its bits and pieces that I actually listened to the whole album from start to finish (you'll hear my review at a later time).

To try to get to the point (wait, I've got a point?!) of this long-winded musing, I guess that I think this whole concept of downloadable music actually effects the way we (or at least, I) take in music. Think back to years ago, before Napster made the record industry shit its pants, when you would go out and buy an album and that's all you'd listen to for a week. These days you've heard the leak a month before it's on the shelf. The album has lost a bit of its mystique, especially from the days of vinyl, perhaps the most album-oriented music-media ever. On CDs you could at least freely and easily skip songs. Vinyl is too much of a pain to do that. So you've got to sit through that album. Or at least the side. But I'd finally like to say that I am not completely writing off downloading music. That would make me a complete hypocrite. Downloading is great for the music listener, as it opens our ears to such a vast amount of things we may not have otherwise hear. I think downloading can even work to the industry's favor, as many of the artists whose products I buy or shows I go to are bands that I originally came to from the internet. I just think that we need to be careful about how we treat this privilege.