Me & Music

Just a quick one. I just realised that my relationship with music has become a rather strange one. Ive written previously on my inability to remember track names, albums names, artist names, anything really that relates to a piece of music, but this is not why my relationship is strange. It used to be normal, I used to get joy and maybe even a little thrill from hearing about a new record dropping, then going to either buy the record or download the record. These days though that is rare, and this is because of iTunes.

Not because it makes music instantly accessible. But because my last laptop basically died and had to be reformatted. How can this effect my relationship with music? Well on that laptop I had thousands of songs, days and days of music, weeks of music, probably even months could go by before a song was repeated, for some too much music. But I loved being able to switch so easily between so many genres, it suited my eclectic musical tastes. I had hundreds of CD’s from my shelves and boxes copied on to it, and many more downloads, both legal and illegal. And almost instantly they were just gone. No longer a couple of clicks away.

Luckily, I had all the downloads backed up on to an external hardrive so set forth on a rather daunting task, rebuilding my iTunes library. I’m sure many of you have done this many times, but something clicked inside me and I became somewhat of an obsessive about it. I didn’t get too far before the laptop was in need of replacement, and this is kinda where the madness really began and why I currently have a strange relationship to music.

Instead of just adding all the music back on to the new laptop from the external hard drive I am going through the folders one by one and listening to every track in full before deciding whether I want to have it on my laptop or not. This is very time consuming, I started probably around 5 months ago and only have 1136 (extremely good) tracks on here. On top of this, when Im adding them to iTunes I now have the compulsion to fill in the Album, Album Artist, Year, Composer, and Group (I use this for the label the track was released on) information, where before unless I was adding an entire album I wouldnt bother with the details. Its a madness, I should be committed. And this is why my relationship is strange, because its like Im now seeing music as a business, Ive taken away some of the enjoyment of it, Im just trying to get through the folders, arghghgh. And as far as new music? It pisses me off now, because so much good stuff is coming out it’s delaying my rebuild like a box of Tetley delays a house build, haha.

My only consolation is that I will one day have the best iTunes library in existence.

PEACE