[FalkirkBairn01]

COLLECTION SIZE
I’ve been buying soundtrack albums seriously since I bought the original 2-LP STAR WARS set back when it first came out – or perhaps a few months later than its original release because I originally received the album on cassette the Christmas around the film’s release. Since then I have been an avid buyer of film/TV/video game music to pretty much the exclusion of everything else. I’ve lost track of the number of CDs and digital albums I have, but I do have a database where my entire collection is listed. Because of a quirk of mine I list my collection not as albums but as titles. This means that single albums with music from multiple titles are listed separately – so some “albums” in my database may have only one track. Also, titles may have multiple entries if there are several releases of the same title that I have bought over the years (THE BLUE MAX anyone?) or there are several recordings of titles (e.g., the CONAN scores, PSYCHO, JAWS, etc.). Taking all that into account, my database is telling me that I have music from 17,500 titles spread across CDs and digital albums. Far too much to listen to.

ACQUISITION HABITS
I have progressed along the LP, CD, digital, road to the present day where streaming with occasional CD/digital purchases are now the norm. CD purchases are only really limited to recent releases such as the James Bond CDs, and titles such as THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. Milestone titles for me where I NEED to have the physical copy. I will also buy digital albums if there are titles where the bulk of the album is worth having. And I will buy a couple of tracks from digital albums if I want to have them on my portable player (which tends to be an old smartphone which I use as a music playing device.

LISTENING HABITS
Currently, 99% of my CDs are in storage at another site so I don’t have immediate access to them. Currently I have a “best of” playlist of about 1600 tracks that I play on shuffle. I have my collection on a 2TB hard drive (which is mirrored on a separate 2TB hard drive) that I have stored in a drawer and, if I want to listen to a specific album then I will either pull out the hard drive plug it in and listen to the album. Or I will find it on Spotify and listen to it. I only occasionally want to listen to old albums. What I am into now – and have been for a number of years – is keeping up-to-date on current, new releases. I have a #WeeklyRecommendations blog where I try to post my recommendations on what’s interesting that has been released every week. This means that I am listening to about 50 newly released albums a week (listening to varying degrees of detail) so that I can let everyone know what’s out there (mostly being released digitally). These recommendations can range between 1 and 6 albums a week. So, I tend to know a little about a lot of albums rather than knowing a few albums in great detail – this latter situation was what I was like in the ’80s when I had only a few albums but listened to them often. Again, a quirk of mine is that I have a second database where I have details of all the titles I have listened to during my time of putting together my weekly recommendations, and that database currently has 13,000 albums in it (with that number rising by about 50 titles every week).

So that’s me in a nutshell. My focus is more of keeping an eye on what’s out there at the moment so I can’t talk about many current albums in detail. And, since I am about 4-6 weeks behind on my listening for my blog, by the time I have caught up with what’s out today (in 4-6 weeks time) everyone has moved on talking about what’s out now (in the future). It does mean though that, by the time I get to the new releases I have a fair idea what everyone things of them.