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Confessions of a man with too much music

Boys Noize “Overthrow”

I love music, I love music so very deeply.

I realize that one can stream music from just about anywhere, and I do that like most people, and maybe this makes me old, but I prefer to own the music that I listen to.

The problem with being such a rabid aficionado of so many forms of music is that my collection is massive, to the point that it has become cumbersome.

There have been many times in the last several years where I would hear something from an artist that I thought I had just recently discovered only to find out that I already had tracks from that artist in one of my music mixes, or actually owned the very track in question.

“Michael, how large is your collection?”

It’s smaller than some, but very likely larger than most others. How many mp3s do I own? I honestly could not tell you. Terabytes worth?

I don’t know.

I can tell you that at one point, many years ago, I did count up all of my CDs and I was well north of 900. Thanks to Amazon Music’s AutoRip feature, a lot of the CDs that I purchased from them were automatically converted to mp3s to add to my collection, but that’s only a chunk of the digital music I have purchased.

My current Bandcamp collection currently shows 479 items. Mind you, that’s a mix of singles, EPs, and full-length albums, but again, not insignificant. If I am being honest, I didn’t get serious about using Bandcamp as a source of music until 2020 (during COVID), and certainly once they started doing Bandcamp Fridays.

I have created over 108 music “mixtapes” digitally, spread between Amazon Music and Spotify. Each “mixtape” is 20 tracks long, so that’s almost 2200 individual tracks there, most of which I own.

So, when I say that my music collection is large, well, like I said, 900+ CDs (more like 1000+ as I didnt stop buying CDs, and still haven’t), 150-200 vinyl albums, and I would say tens of thousands of digital files isn’t wrong. I just looked at my MediaMonkey library and I show about 33K tracks.

All this is preamble to the fact that sometimes I think I’ve discovered a new artist, or new to me, only to find that, huh, I already own music by the artist and have for weeks/months/years.

In this particular case, it’s Boys Noize (check out my other blog where I highlight another track of his).

I saved his album +/- to my Bandcamp wish list some time ago and have hemmed and hawed about finally purchasing it, but after seeing him open for Nine Inch Nail this tour I knew I had to finally purchase some music by Boys Noize.

Only, I already had.

No, I am not talking about some of the collabs I’ve purchased recently, like “Fine Day Anthem” (Extended Mix), which is an excellent update of the old Opus III track that you should check out.

I knew I found Boys Noize sometime in the last year or two, but as I was listening to his music while working the other day a track came on called “Overthrow.” I immediately recognized it, but also knew it was not something new.

“Do I own this already,” I thought to myself?

Readers, I did.

I thought I only discovered Boys Noize within the last year or two, but nope, apparently I first heard of him sometime in 2016, as that’s when my Amazon account shows that I bought the mp3 for “Overthrow.”

Yeah, this new artist?

I had already discovered him almost 10 years back.

I am not saying this to sound like a hipster (“oh, yeah, I knew him before he was popular”), but more to highlight the fact that I have so much music (too much, maybe, according to some) that I discover artists, forget about them, and then rediscover them many years later.

I love music, I really do, but I have so much, which is both a good and a bad thing.