I received my first piece of physical media when I was about six years old. It was a tape cassette of Backstreet Boys’ second album Backstreet’s Back. I held a dance party in my bedroom that evening with all of my friends. We took turns, one by one, using flashlights from the top bunk of my bed as spotlights to fully reenact our childhood picture of a live show as the rest of us twisted and shouted to boy band mega-singles.
It wasn’t long after that I started asking for blank tapes. Through a friend, I learned that one could use these to record music from the radio. Armed with a six-pack of RCA blanks, I sat waiting for the DJ to introduce the next set of songs with my finger poised on the record button, ready to collect.
I still have some of those painstakingly curated mixes. Each of them are crudely labeled with my initials, “Mix,” and a number that corresponded with the order in which it was added to my shoebox of tapes. These are living, albeit dusty remnants of the impetus of my music collecting obsession. Be it a hobby or a compulsion, it’s a trait that has evolved in scope and size for more than two decades over many formats—both physical and digital.
As cassettes became outdated and personal computers gave us greater access to a network of web pages and digital stores, MP3 players became a prevalent way to carry media. The Creative NOMAD MuVo debuted in 2002 and the iPod followed in 2007. I purchased one from the Creative line in 2006, a MuVo V100 I think, a decade after my music collection began.
I lacked a meaningful Internet connection, so I populated my 512MB player with tracks transferred from friends’ flash drives or downloaded via long defunct audio search engines like Dogpile (still around, sans audio tab) and SingingFish at school. It was middle school when I started borrowing stacks of CDs from the local library to rip on my parents' 2004 Dell desktop computer. I pirated these to 128kbps MP3s and quickly filled my parent’s hard drive, which meant shoving a repurposed hard drive I picked up from Lord knows where.
With the collection growing so rapidly, I came to dislike the organizational preferences of Windows Media Player. As nice as Microsoft’s visualizations were, the passive nature of that player just didn’t scale. I think that’s when I moved to Musicmatch Jukebox, which worked just fine until its Yahoo! branded successor ruined the experience. My library moved to Winamp and stayed until I bought my first Macintosh in 2011.
From 2012 on, I started working in a journalistic capacity within the music industry. Like my parent’s old Dell, it didn’t take long to fill that shiny chrome laptop. I had to buy several Western Digital MyBooks to store the endless advances, mixes, and promos sent to me over WeTransfer, Dropbox, and emails (savages). These were rarely organized, tossed into folders titled “To-Do” or “Unsorted.” It’s a miracle that I can find anything from that period of my life, but I’m glad when I do. Those editorial gigs gave me access to music that I would have never otherwise have found.
To this day, my library is still fragmented into very specific segments based on the time period and devices I most commonly used at the time. I’ve spent weeks over the course of years in an attempt to consolidate these libraries into one master. It’s been slow going, delayed by the never-ending stream of new music I acquire and the desire to replace media with higher quality copies—where I can find them.
Despite what might sound like grumbling, organizing my music into properly titled folders and filling out ID3 tags is genuinely one of my favorite ways to pass time. The archival process is a soothing one that somehow sparks joy in my brain. Talking about it is fun too, but you wouldn’t hear that said by my romantic partner or a lot of my close personal friends. Conversation about bitrates, metadata, and obsessive collecting is generally reserved for like-minded weirdos I meet on the Internet.
With this blog, I’m giving myself a new outlet to journal the music I collect, how I collect it, the history behind it, and how I contextualize it all in the real world. Thanks for reading.