Post-Scarcity Collections Become Ruins
My attitudes toward music have changed drastically in the past few years, in several ways. It’s become so easy to obtain digital music, and squeezing it onto mobile devices so convenient over physical media, that I’ve bought more music, been exposed to more music, and seen more live shows in the past few years than I ever used to. Everyone seems to be in the same boat.
It’s set me thinking though, is my MP3 folder really a collection anymore? There are a great many things that have been passed to me by others, and my MP3 library has become unwieldy. I bought a 160GB ipod to keep it on, and yet it now seems far too large. Like a Dunbar number for community relationships, beyond a certain point, music collections surpass our ability to maintain, understand and cherish what we have. They’re no longer collections, but Gormenghast-like ruins full of neglected subfolders, forgotten artists, and never listened to back catalogues.
Collections en masse have become incomprehensible, and playlists wear out their welcome fast. A few friends have been knocking an idea around: To periodically archive MP3s, keeping only a current rotation of recently bought stuff and highly valued artists intentionally pulled out of the archive. I don’t miss CDs at all, but I do miss the time when I could look down the rack, not see a single stranger and hum every song on each album.