I have too much music on my hard drive. I've amassed so many tracks from various sources, failed to archive CDs because I was freeing up hard drive space and thought I'd never listen to them again, bought digital copies and own the CDs, again, never touched. I'm leaning more and more toward pure digital even being smart to the temporary nature of legal copies are, that I don't "own" this shit. I've gone to bandcamp which does let me own shit. I should probably use it more, but I'm a slave to my Apple account, which in fairness has delivered some surprises I thought impossible to find. I know what needs to be done to preserve this shit but I've gotten horribly lazy about it. I've even repurchased albums that were locked to limited devices on a previous account and some now miraculously saved my only copy of Miracle, one of the bonus tracks from American Doll Posse that isn't as easy to get now. So I used to value my music. I used to treasure my burnt CDs, I'm even going to find them to make playlists if I can, because I'm in a weird place and that often generates misguided nostalgia.
What I did dig out I wound up having to go through one by one since they weren't how I remembered. There wasn't a particular playlist I just carried around burnt CDs and used a walkman until I could afford an iPod. I had a list on our home computer when I was looking for songs, I think when I was unemployed my only happiness came from music and searching for songs, I made trips to the CD rental store and wound up selling original CDs once I'd burnt everything on blanks. Curating everything was therapeutic, my CDs got me through long trips around town or down to Fremantle. The walks I had to go on for Mutual Obs were unreasonable but I always took my dealings seriously, and making me walk miles to wherever my placement office was then assigning me to someone miles from there, I needed my walkman, as I needed my ipod as I need my phone and earphones, like I'll inconvenience myself to get them back. I think that was the last day I was in the office, if I'd not gone back for them I'd have been screwed.
But the tragedy of this is really the fact I'm so not pumped for Tori's new CD and I've just pre-ordered the physical copy out of habit. I've listened to Halsey's new album on an almost religious level, way more than I dedicated to the new Garbage CD, which I don't have a physical copy of. I really didn't bother with anything after Version 2.0, I have Not Your Kind of People and ended up downloading the one song I liked anyway, because I cannot justify the cost of an external CD drive to make use of it for an hour for four or five CDs I didn't think I'd ever listen to. I got a bonus track from Heather Nova's Oyster from this lack of foresight. Plus a lot of stuff's been remastered so you're sometimes better off getting a digital download. I at least made some kind of an effort to buy most of the tracks I got from Napster/Limewire. I mean it costs more than it sounds like but I felt like I "made up" for it once I finally did. The plan's since fallen in a hole realising I didn't listen to a lot of those tracks anymore anyway. I'll get through it all one day, maybe. Trawling for B-sides and rarities just isn't worth the hassle now.
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