IanB wrote: dave clarkson wrote: Yeah I'm guilty of that one. What's it's done for me though is have a bad effect. I'm sick to death of music in general and feel saturated to the point where nothing musically excites me anymore.
I'm very much with you on that.
I listen to everything I buy, find or get given but according to iTunes it would take me 208 days (presumably without sleep) to listen to everything I own including spoken word. When I joined the move towards digital in 2002 and loaded up my cds on to my hard drive I had a about a tad over a quarter of that. So in six years I've quadrupled a collection that had taken decades to build. A lot of it live recordings and radio plays etc but still. That's a crazy amount to get a handle on.
Every day I find myself starting off with good intentions and then part of a tune or a riff or a vocal inflection will remind me of another artist or album and I'm off. Just this am I went from Lisa Gerrard to This Mortal Coil to Chris Bell to Cheap Trick to Big Star to Matthew Sweet to Richard Hell in less than an hour. It's like a game of aural six degrees of separation on fast forward. And I'm doing all this while working so I am not really listening at all.
There is something in me that craves a return to having 400 or 500 great vinyl lps across the genres, binning off the cds and digital.
Digital is great for spoken word and for bootlegs but I feel that I need to
get back to some serious listening. And that either requires a narrower focus or the kind of discipline as a listener that I simply don't have.
That's why it's great to a have a few Holy Grails just out of reach, holds back music from being totally commodified.
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