What do you think will happen to your music collection?

you wouldn't!

In many ways it's kind of a history of who I am and where I've been, both literally and metaphorically, so I think I'd like to keep it, same as my books (but not, maybe, my DVDs, because a DVD is just a means for expressing a thing, whereas a CD or record is the actual thing itself). I've said before that I don't use things as emotional batteries, and I still think I don't, but even so, unless something catastrophic happens to it, I like to think I'd keep it forever. And, as I've said before, if something catastrophic happened to it, I wouldn't try and rebuild it; I'd take up fishing or something and become a 12 CD a year person.

Also if anyone deserves to inherit my 'collection', ahem, it'd be yr sister, obv.

Of course I'd like to keep mine till my dying day - as you say, a music collection is better than a diary in many ways and selling it or throwing it away would be like getting rid of massive chunks in my life. But then maybe someone'll work out a way to compress an entire cd collection into a special kind of gas you keep in a plastic bag or something and so the collection would be worthless other than for the sentimental/collectors value of having an original release. I wonder if CDs will become like records in the future? Will a first pressing of a CD be worth a lot of money like some records can be?

Oh without a shadow of a doubt.

Just like old casette originals.

I'll sell a lot of mine. There are a few Blur albums I'm already contemplating visiting E-Bay with.

When I give an album away, I almost always want to listen to it immediately afterwards. Selling them would probably be worse - but I already have more than I'm ever going to listen to. I'd like to think I like the CDs for the music, and how it makes me feel rather than as objects.

Indeed. Then again I'm a big fan of album artwork and the concept of an album being a "thing" that you listen to as a whole. That's why the MP3 revolution doesn't sit so well with me. No artwork and plus all the tracks are jumbled up.
This is off topic, but I can't sit and listen to an album properly if it's playing through Winamp or whatever - it's far too easy to skip around and fast forward through. I burn most of my MP3s to CD for this reason.

Just turn off 'shuffle' on the iPod is what I do.

My kids will get some of it. They're after it already.

Oooh! An iPod! Well arrren't we posh? ;-)

Yeh, fair do's but I still skip around in Winamp and never really feel like I'm listening to the album properly if being played off the pc.

I would normally have left my collection to my children, but as it is now increasingly unlikely that I will ever have any children, under the terms of my current will the collection is to be left to the Mitchell Library in Glasgow with strict instructions that it must not be divided up or any part of it sold off.

Charlie, if you didn't smoke, you could haf an iPod too. :o)

two words: VIKING FUNERAL.

Don't want no smelly iPod.

Actually I'm not even sure what one is. Is that a posh name for a MP3 walkman? I do have a CD-player that plays CD-Rs with MP3s on them and I like that just fine.

i sells some cd's, but its really only ones i got from the bargain bin or something that i never liked anyway. i had no problems selling that john fogerty album or lou reeds Magic and Loss.

I hope when I die all my music ends up being dumped en masse into one or two used shops so some 14 year old genius can pick up tons of Can, Magma, Sonic Youth and Wolf Eyes shit cheap

If I don't make some appropriate stipulation in my will, I imagine someone will end up selling the whole lot for a fraction of what it's worth, because they have no concept of which bits are worth money and just how much they're worth.

The viking funeral idea is very appealing.

Once you start moving around, the weight (metaphorical and otherwise) of these things becomes a burden. I've started doing the selling off. Vinyl of course is impossible to get rid of these days (at least in Montreal). CDs are also becoming harder to disown. I've got so much crap that I've tried to pass off over the years, I just ended up throwing things in the garbage, which was frightening and then liberating. I'm not getting all Zen about it, but it does feel good to relieve yourself of so much shit.

I can totally see the appeal of that.

I'd like to think that my putative kids (or even grandkids!) would enjoy rummaging around through the antiquated music and technology. It would be like a personal statement of who I was, especially all the home-recordings.

I also think I should have a list of who gets what CDs if I go early (my wife would be glad to be unburdened of them). Who gets what would be really defining of their place in your life, I suppose, or at least how much credit you give them for "good" taste.

If I have any children, I would like to imagine them sorting out my albums and discovering exciting old music, just like me with my dad's record collection.
I tremble just thinking about kids messing with my cd's, though. ;)

I was thinking about maintaining some sort of permanent archive and then donating it somewhere should I not have direct heirs, a bit like what Marcello suggests. But the fluid nature of music these days combined wtih a realization that, hell, that's a LOT of stuff I have means I'm starting a steady reduction in the least essential parts of what I've got, though not before mp3ing/AACing what I have. Far more compact, less to move, and so forth. Beyond that, no predictions.

a category 4 hurricane's gonna come up the mouth of the river while im out of town and everything i own will be destroyed by the storm surge.

friends, trash cans, and Goodwill.

I've actually been having this dilemma regarding zines lately. I've ended up sending more than half my collection to the Pop Culture Library in Bowling Green, OH. Ideally, if my children don't want my music collection, I'd like it to be archived in a similar way.

Or heck, go ahead and give it to Goodwill. Hopefully it would give unsuspecting record-loving thrifters some pleasant surprises.

I have always wanted my children to have my music. To have the opportunity to discover bits of me through my taste that they would not have otherwise.

My father being into the Beatles and letting me have his albums is a big part of my conception of who he is without having the direct experience of hanging out with him when he was younger.

One of the big things that struck me when I first watched Modulations was DJ Spooky talking about how he came to know his father who died early though his record collection.

We can always leave the kids playlists.

My brother died when I was 16. He was 8 years older than me and already a huge music buff and loved stuff that, at the time, seemed very obscure. His most prized possession was his vinyl collection, which is now mine. I feel like I've gotten to know him threw listening to those albums. Although they are a pain in the ass to move around, etc. I can't see myself ever selling them. I would love for my son to one day love them like I have, but for now all he has managed to do is break a Gang of Four record (which brought him immense joy) and scratch up my favorite Yellowman lp with Henry the Train. Course he's only 2.

My dad still has lots of vinyl jazz LPs from 30 odd years ago, so I suspect I will still have loads of my CD's. Maybe I'll store them on some horrid digital device, but I dunno.

cds will probably all disintegrate by the time I die if I die because I'm old. If I die early which I constantly feel is much more likely, my wife will have to sort them out. Goodby King Crimson cds, someone at the used record store will learn to love you.

I'll take all that Genesis!

May you enjoy Three Sides Live in good health.

"Once you start moving around, the weight (metaphorical and otherwise) of these things becomes a burden."

Seconded. I've got three office storage bins filled with old cassettes and CDs, 90% of which I just don't listen to anymore because of sheer overfamiliarity - a lot of this stuff is burned into my brain and would take 20 years in a gulag to erase...

is dog latin joking about his ignorance of ipods?????

i don't have 3 sides live. but you can have the Soup Dragons promo single if I didn't throw it away.

WHICH ONE?

I had the rather onerous task of going through about 1000 CDs yesterday, buried in a shed where I'm storing my stuff while I'm out of the country, whittling things down. I suspect I'll be doing the same next week as well. One of the guys at the local shop says the used trade is dying off a bit, nature of music distribution and consumption changing and all.

I admit I'm actually working against my better (back) interests by buying more vinyl than I have in years. I've now got my collection scattered about in three countries. I'm sure I'll just lose one chunk somewhere down the road. Can't say I'm that bothered. Been buying records for 30+ years and they've served me well. Hopefully someone else will find as much pleasure as I did with 'em.

I honestly think that I won't have a record 'collection' someday.

Maybe it's because I just spent four days moving all of our worldy possessions, and that the hardest job by far was boxing and moving all the music, but I don't think I'm ready to resign myself to the fact that I'll be saddled with all this heavy shit the rest of my life. One day, when I have children, and space becomes important, I'm going to get a loan from the bank and take 6 months and just do nothing but load everything into whatever technology is available (iPod, whatever) and whatever doesn't fit into a milkcrate on top of the closet goes into the garbage (or a used record store, if such things still even exist).

I'll always love music but don't always need the souveniers.

here, if it's still around.

Well said.

We have a five month old baby who, for the most part, is entirely immobile. Last night, we had some friends over who brought their one-year-old, who was ENTIRELY mobile, and seemingly on a perpetual seek & destroy mission. Suffice to say, our apartment is not quite yet baby-proofed. Charlie (the one year old's father) told me some harrowing stories about how his little Harry likes to pull discs off of his shelves and use them as de-facto skis/snow-shoes (scuffing up both the floor and doing unimaginable damage to the discs in question).

That all said, I've managed to rip most of the crucial bit of my collection onto my computer/iTunes/iPod. Conceivably, I might be forced to clear the decks and put all the discs in storage. We don't have many options of putting them on higher shelves at the moment.

In storage -- like my vinyl -- they'll invariably sit there until such time as (a) we move to place where I can keep them out of harm's (read: Charlotte's) reach or (b) they sit there until I'm inevitably struck by a runaway garbage truck kareening down Univeristy Place, after which my worldly possessions will be hocked for cash.

Have I any choice in the matter, though, I'd leave it all to my nephew Whalen, who is becoming a music-loving geek like myself.

Whalen?

Hey, it wasn't my choice (it's my mother's maiden name).

Nick's vision of a possible (but unlikely) future catastrophe involving his music collection made me shiver, because I worry about those sorts of things. As he said, I also could not imagine trying to reconstruct my entire collection. That would be akin to your dog dying, and then getting a new dog of the same breed, giving it the same name, and teaching it the same tricks. I could never pretend that the duplicate music collection was the same (even if it were possible to collect all those things again, which it probably isn't).

I'm too protective. I can picture myself as a curmudgeonly old miser who never leaves his one-bedroom apartment and stands guard over his collection until he drops dead one day but whose body isn't found for two weeks because nobody thought to look behind the pile of old Kraftwerk records.

Assuming that my kid(s) are well into music, I'll give everything to them. Otherewise it goes to their kids, and if they're not interested I'll write some notes for my great-grandchildren as to where to start, how the genre lines divide everything up, etc and just give it to them.

Not that mp3s would be a real replacement, but I've managed to rip about 1700 of 2500 albums to mp3, and I've got them on an external HD and an mp3 player and I often consider putting the CDs in some kind of protected storage as a permanent "archive". But I want to have at least two mp3 copies of everything, and I always keep one with me in case my place were to burn down--there'be absolutely no way to replace it all, I'll never have the money. I hate being so attached to "things"--especially when there's really no other material objects in my world that I'd really care much about at all if they went up in smoke.

I hope that my hypothetical kids would someday think it were cool to inherit such a collection. I can't imagine it, as my parents had the requisite 50-odd LPs of a hippie's collection, nothing I didn't have myself by the time I was 14. But I assume when I'm dead, I won't give a shit what happens to it all.

Hmm, I guess my HDs will be formatted. How sad is that ?

I love that anecdote DeRogatis recounted in his Lester Bangs bio - about the about the black detective investigating Bangs' death, finding a coveted rare jazz LP amongst all the records, and Robert Duncan allowing him to keep it, reasoning that Lester woulda been flattered.

my cd's will have all oxidised, three are already on their way. fortunately, all the vinyl should still play, the covers will probably go first. the cdr backups are already on an external hd. not all the cdr backups from 2000 could open sadly. the way of the world. i imagine afetr all the ipod's need replacing, hard drives becoming corrupted with bad sectors, superstar djs spilling red bull on their mac laptops * and their cd/dvd backups slowly oxidise and become unplayable, there might be a resurgance of music purchasing. and twenty years after the bands have all split, a sudden influx of royalty payments may eventually head their way...

my boss has lester bangs's copy of the third godz record. signed to lester by kessler or mccarthy, i don't remember which.

The whole notion of a music collection, as a matter of personal property, seems so odd to me now that I've had all my music ripped to mp3 for so long. Why should it matter what music *I* "own" and you own, when it's all just bits anyway? Why not just have some vast jukebox database, kinda like what the current subscription services offer, of *everything* that's ever been recorded? Why should we spend so much time acquiring for ourselves new music?

The answer is probably in part, because it keeps the music economy going. But I don't see why a subscription-type global jukebox couldn't do that too, if the prices were right. A more interesting but ultimately not very helpful answer, I think, has to do with the primacy of the desire to accumulate goods for ourselves: i.e., the "record collector" mindset. But I think that captures only very few people's views, even on ILM.

i just gave away 75% of my cd collection to someone in exchange for the use of their wireless internet connection.. so far ive taken about half of those cds back immediately because i missed them!! but all in all it was a fair trade i figured no music's that priceless or hard to find and if it is and i really want it it will be worth the endless searching in the end

Like just about everyone else, i suppose i'll leave my collection for the next generation. If my son were interested, great, if not i'd be into some form of a Willy Wonka golden ticket giveaway.

I worry about not having a will, though, none of my friends or family would have the first clue about what was there. Not quite THAT bad, there'd be a bunch of people who'd love to pilfer through and pick out their favorite bits of juicy, but it's doubtful much would stay intact. And since i refuse to label or deface any of these materials (excepting in those cases of repair), any association with the curator would soon be forgotten - besides, posterity is overrated.

Wait, i've changed my mind - I'm taking it with me, stereo and all! --all the pharaoh’s prized possessions aligned, stacked and ready ...and a mini-fridge.

...as for MP3s - they're like nachos; you don't buy nachos, you just rent 'em.