At an average of $10/album and 11 tracks per album, 750k tracks works out to $681,818. Over $1.3 million dollars for a library that’s double that size. What do people do for a living that they can afford to purchase such a library?
I guess I’m happy for them if they acquired this content without resorting to piracy…even if the value proposition is puzzling in a world where you can rent 70 million tracks for less than $20/month.
People are thinking it. There. I said it. Apologies to anyone I’ve offended. An incredible library is, well, incredible…at least to most of us.
David it is a fair point.
My library is small in comparison at about 55k but I have collected music since the age of 12 and I added a lot off music while working away from home.
A lot of people collect music cheaply these days and in the other threads people talk of paying $0.25 and $0.50 per CD while traveling. I have picked up hundred’s of CDs in the last two years for probably about $3 each, but it is not a cheap hobby
I recently got access to a very large back collection of pop music through the 90’s to around 2015 when the person collecting the music died. I came to the conclusion I didn’t want most of it in my collection. It would have yielded an impressive track count but I wouldn’t have sat down for a session and elected to play much if any of it. I am going to rip it for the owner (who is sight impaired) so the work will be done. I simply don’t need it!
With the wide public acceptance of music streaming services the revenue stream from the sales of recordings for most artists has disappeared and the money generated by streaming is also quite small, again for most artists. This has lead to very high concert ticket prices since the revenue from live performance is most artists only significant income source. So now the single most important thing for most artists is that their recordings be heard by as many listeners as possible in the hopes that some of them will like the music enough to pay to see them in concert.
First the Internet devalued the written word and destroyed journalism and now the Internet is destroying music and movies.
Certainly not a cheap hobby. My CD, LP, and digital download collection is not stolen… unless the labels come and request the demos they gave us when working in music stores. I have been collecting music for 35 years and am a crate digger and treasure hunter. I do it for the music and the hunt…not for a track count.
I agree with Henri. I too have more music than I could ever possibly listen to, but I like to look at front and back covers. It reminds me of the days of Tower Records where I could browse and wish I could afford many of the records I wanted. Now, with the release of mega box sets, I can do this, and browse the album covers and read the pdf booklets if I care to. I am also a collector and find collecting cds/downloads to be very enjoyable.
I think that is what led me to ask this question to begin with. I mean, my priority is my own 40,000 track collection, which I know I can go to at any time and find nothing but stuff I like.
If I want to explore beyond that, I can do that with a streaming service (which I will only ever use free trials of to explore and then buy the few things I discover) or 1.5 minute iTunes previews (which are generally good enough for me to explore), and I don’t have to hold those things in my collection. I always assume there is a whole world of stuff out there I haven’t yet heard - albeit significantly decreased for me these days - and that I needn’t worry about having it in my possession on the if-come. If I were to do that, I would never want that stuff mixed with my 40,000 tracks. I would want it in two separate collections (which is kind of how I mentally deal with my own collection vs iTunes Store/Spotify/Apple Music/Qobuz/7digital/YouTube/etc.).
P.S.: I realize that there is still a (very) small bunch of stuff that you can’t preview or get on any of those services. I have some of that in my own library. But I acknowledge that there is a law of significant diminishing returns. I would be so bold to suggest that there is relatively little music anymore that is of shared social or artistic significance that isn’t available on one of those services, and I don’t obsess about that small slice of the world the way others might.
Of course, at retirement age it is no longer possible to listen to many millions of music titles again or for the first time in the short lifetime. That does not diminish the passion to continue collecting.
…a few years later there were over 8 million in vinyl alone!
Large digital collections offer some advantages that collectors of LPs or CDs can only enjoy with digitization and streaming. The number of these large collections is very small. The general rejection, knowledge and misunderstanding about the market happening and intensive collecting is very large.
These days if one really wants to support musicians then instead of buying their CDs, one should either buy downloads from Bandcamp (if available) or, better still, buy a ticket to one of their live performances and if possible do both. Buying used LPs and CDs doesn’t count because the sale generates NO income for the musicians. There are lots of high roads that one can take but in the end this an industry wide issue which cannot be solved by the actions of a few high minded individuals.
So far we haven’t mentioned copyright laws nor what to do about the music made by now deceased artists.
Concerts and direct sales are good for artists if the personal conditions are right and the fan base is large enough for this. The many millions of artists on the streaming and download services very rarely find enough of an audience and therefore offer samples largely free of charge via Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Spotify and co. It’s an attempt to get into the music business. The chances of gaining sufficient exposure hardly increase with Bandcamp or Soundcloud. If you are not streamed on Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon, you already need a loyal small fan base to find other ways of success. If you look for Bandcamp, Roon, Tidal or Qobuz in these large numbers, you will find it only in the per mille range no longer presentable. It is less than a stroke of the pen in the rapidly growing streaming market.
I do both. I attend as many live shows as possible, and always check bandcamp first for buying their music. And if bands are selling CDs at shows, I always buy these, even if I don’t think I’ll like it that much. One it’s a souvenir, but two, and more importantly, this is immediate money in their pocket.
I went a bit mad when i first joined the streaming services and added anything and everything. Now I’m reducing the library size to tracks i will actually listen to.
I have an embarrassing amount of music due to swapping hard drives with friends with four friends who are collectors and tapers. Lots of duplicates (supposed better recordings, DCC, Target CDs, Audio Fidelity, Needle Drops) and live concert recordings from sound boards. I found it amazing that ROON could collate it all and still perform quick searches. Not sure if my issue with searches is due to having too many albums/track cuts when searching it misses a lot of albums from bands when I do a band search, so I need to scroll through my entire collection to find the band and then look through all of their albums I have, but in general it does a decent job searching. Yes I need to go through and delete music like crazy because I will never listen to it all, even if I wanted to, I do not need duplicates of albums nor to keep music from bands I have no interest in just on the off chance a friend asks to hear music from them since I also subscribe to Qobuz. I need to figure out which ones sound the best for duplicate reduction, delete bands I have no interest in and lastly, to give ROON a little bit of a break. Unfortunately I am a collector and it is very hard to delete, but I will start the process this summer of 2022. I just have to, my collection is ridiculously too large, it is that simple. No need to have 8 TB of music and backing this up is a pain, too time consuming.
„Backup is a pain and time consuming“???
My backup (for all data) starts 12:05 in the night every day. I do not have to do anything, just check the system once in a while. It is part of an IT-system to do backup on its on.
I added a custom tag “Core” set to 0 then progressively set it to 1
JRiver has a wonderful feature that allows effectively cut and paste based on a metadata Tag rule say [Core] = 1 so you can create a copy elsewhere and still keep in as a watched folder .
I have set up a secondary library view in JRiver to show only my Core
