Why I love music
When I tell people how many CDs I own or how many songs I have in my iTunes library, people often say to me, “why do you have so many” or “how do you ever listen to them all”. These are legitimate questions and I thought I would finally answer them.
Why so many?
If you think about how many different things we all do during a day/week, you go through many different actions. For me, I listen to music from 6:20 am until around 10:30 pm. This is not continuous, but sometimes it could be. I listen to it while driving to work, while at work (occasionally) when driving home, when exercising, when writing on here, while surfing the net, while showering….it is ever rarely off. Some might think that is entirely crazy, that I would go insane from continual noise, but that has never been the case, the only time I can’t have noise is when I am sleeping.
Throughout all these different activities, I am in different moods, different energy levels and different levels of focus. This means that I will listen to different types of music depending on what I’m doing at the time. I will also listen to different music dependent on what kind of mood I am in. This means that I can’t listen to the same 20 albums over and over, you need variety.
I have also found that the more music that I listen to, the more I want to listen to. When I find a new band, if I end up liking them, I will then go and buy every single album they have released so that I have the entire collection. You then hear the connection between different songs, bands and genres. It then opens you up to different styles of music that you may have not heard of before. I enjoy this immensely; as I’m listening so often that I’m always on the lookout for new music to add to my collection. Yes, as you may have guessed, I’m a collector and so even if I don’t like the album as much as others, I will still get it if it’s by a band that I like.
The final reason is that I also DJ, and so have a large and varied library is useful for any situation. Having only one style of music is very limiting, so I try to keep myself open to all styles of music.
How do you ever listen to them all?
The thing is that I DON’T listen to them all; however, I do listen to a large majority of them. Just checked then, I have listened to 52% of my library at least once. Now, you may think that this is a small number, but considering I have 17,410 songs in my library, it takes a LONG time to go through all the songs! All of these are currently on my iPod, but soon enough I will get to the point where my library is bigger than my iPod and I will have to unSync some of them.
The reason why I like having more songs than I can handle is that you are always finding songs that you used to enjoy ages ago and then playing them over and over. When you’re not feeling one song, then you just switch to the next until you find something you want to listen to. There’s always an unlimited collection to keep you going.
Now onto why I love music. I enjoy it as it fills that silence that hangs around when you are just doing random tasks. I enjoy it as it lets you dance. I enjoy it because it can change or enhance your mood. I enjoy it because there are stories behind the songs. I enjoy it because they bring people together. I enjoy it because they lift the energy level…I could go on and on. How did I become this way? I’m not sure really, I used to watch RAGE and Video Hits back when I was a kid and I had nothing better to do on Saturday mornings and I would watch for hours. I also used to listen to the radio a lot, as I couldn’t afford CDs. It meant that I was only exposed to pop music, but from there I became interested. I originally bought a few albums and would listen to them over and over. Eventually I started to pour more and more money into it, expanding my collection. To be honest, there are many artists that I listen to that I don’t know how I started listening to them. Which is weird, either someone recommended them to me, or I heard one of their songs somewhere and I liked it enough to look for their other songs.
I have put a lot of effort into my collection to ensure that I don’t have thousands of songs that are unnamed, unrated and unsorted. Otherwise I would never listen to new songs and discover bands and songs that I enjoy but hadn’t heard. The easiest way to do this is to buy the music and then all you need to do it rip from the CD! Has been really easy to keep maintained, but to keep track of my collection is quite difficult, as you can easily lose track of CDs that have been purchased.
People ask me why I do it…Apart from all the things I have mentioned previously, I find music extremely relaxing and it just fills any down time with life and makes it more interesting. I know that I will continue to collect music, it will never end, I can’t see how I could ever stop. It’s always fun to go to the CD shop and browse for new music, if you know the artist or not. Buying new music and discovering that it is some of your favourite is the best part!
I know that eventually I will have an entire room dedicated to my collection. I aim to keep expanding my taste and finding new sounds that I haven’t experienced yet. Mostly my taste is centred around R’n B and Hip Hop, but this spreads far and wide. One genre I’m really excited about discovering is 60s/70s Funk and Soul music. That stuff is kicking, it is some of the most energetic and full music I’ve ever heard! My obsession with it started with James Brown, but I know that I will be getting more and more as time goes on!
I have two books that I have to get through, 1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die and 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. I will be going through and collection ALL of these, if I haven’t already got them. At one stage I was going to review all my CDs that I own. I would still want to do that, but it will take an immense effort! But as I’ve already started talking about my favourite bands, I don’t see why not.
Hopefully this has answered some of your questions and that you agree with me on some points. What do you enjoy about listening to/ collecting music? Let me know!
Submeg
SUBMEG 