Two thousand, six hundred and eight. This is how many CD titles Jennifer, Clare and I have. To most, this seems like a lot. A few years ago, this seemed about right to us, but has increasingly felt like too few. After both working large portions of our lives in music stores, we have been out of the business for about 7 years. Jennifer and I have worked at: Believe in Music (Grand Rapids and Kalamazoo), Borders Books & Music (Novi and Charlotte), Music City (Grand Rapids), Media Play (Grand Rapids) and Schuler Books & Music (Grand Rapids). The last of these was Jennifer at Borders, which she left in early 1999.
As hard as we have tried, it's tough to keep up with the latest. Jen does it with the current pop stuff (which I still cannot for the life of me figure out how she knows the latest top 40 stuff given our lives' time contraints right now). I keep up a little bit, trying stuff somewhat on the fringes. Icelandic groups Mum and Sigur Ros are some of my tenuous threads to being on the ball. And for 7 years now, the promo fairy has not visited. Working in music stores means battling (pushing? deceiving? stealing?) for the promo copies that record companies dole out. The free stuff made growing a collection easy. It's harder now that we have to pay, and have yet to find an adequate used store in Indianapolis. (Is the used CD store going by the wayside due to downloads?)
So, 2006 has begun with a purge of old, unrecognizable (and in some cases unlistenable!) promos and purchases from the past. 2006 will be the year that, through smart purchasing of used CD's, the collection reforms and reshapes itself, filling in the blanks of the last seven years.
1 comment:
Hasn't your music taste chnged? Have you considered trying to sell some of those OLD terribly outdated ones on E-Bay? Don't they become unplayable after so many years? Just think of the space you'd have if you could purge some of them. Of course what excuse have I for holding on to some old 33 1/3 records, I don't even have a turntable that will play them. Ah! Aren't we sentimentalists?
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