I’m Back - With a Pitchfork
OK I’m going to start doing this again.
I stopped for a couple reasons… For one I had a ton of work happening at my business and posting was taking too much time out of my productive work time and I felt guilty doing this instead of that.
The other thing was, that, by posting about music and sharing what I liked, I found myself over organizing my music collection and using the iTunes rating tool to try to keep better track of what I liked and why I liked it. After 2 years of putting tunes into my rating system (*-Favorite Tunes, **-RedRecordBox Suggestions, ***-Good Tunes, ****-Good Jazz and *****-Trash it) I recently spent some extra time listening to my “Rated Music” and found that, for the most part, it was boring and all the same. As of this moment I now have 32,153 songs in my iTunes library. I know I’ve got about 20 tunes with a 5 star rating that I haven’t thrown out yet, and 725 rated songs 1 to 4 stars. HOW COULD I OWN 32000 songs and only have rated 700 in the past 2 years?
Here’s how… While writing this post I’ve been listening to an album by Pitchfork. Actually it’s 2 EPs packaged together called Eucalyptus/Saturn Outhouse. I like their music. Kind of reminds me of Frank Black right after the Pixies but a little heavier. I don’t really know anything about them, I find a lot of new music at EMusic through their daily free track or I find something I like on another Music Blog then go out and find the album. I listened to the whole album, I liked it but I didn’t rate it. It was just part of my day.
2 years ago, 10/18/2005 is when I started to devise and revise my system. Since that date I’ve listened to 10,023 songs (from 1 to 14 times each) and I’ve not listened to 21,886 songs that I own. So in the past 2 years I’ve listened to 2/3 of my music collection that I’ve been accumulating for about 37 years. All of my CDs are ripped to MP3 all of my cassette tapes (except Screaming Blue Messiahs’ - Gun Shy, it’s sitting right here) and most of my vinyl has either been replaced by CD or directly digital) I probably have about 150 vinyl albums in the basement that I haven’t transferred to digital yet but that’s only about 1500 to 2000 more songs that are missing here.
So music is just a part of my life and I probably go days without rating any music. It’s not that I don’t like what I’m listening to, it’s obvious that I don’t think that much about rating.
All that to tell you this. I don’t know if that just made any sense or if most people can imagine having that much music in their collection (it’s an obsession). I will try to serve you with a sample selection of what I’m listening to on a regular basis. I’ve got a lot of ideas at the moment, some friends that have just put out CDs, several great albums that have come out recently and some other things that i have rated 2 stars but haven’t shared yet.
Here’s one of those Pitchfork songs. I’ve listened to it 4 times in the last 20 minutes. I think it has something to do with a farm. Honest!
