Can someone explain large personal music libraries to me?

[KingGheedora]

I like listening to music, but I don't understand collecting huge libraries of music for personal devices. There are several things I'm not understanding:

1. How you can accumulate 100GB+ of music
a. That's literally over a month of music. With heavy use you can still go multiple months without listening to the same song twice.
b. How people can afford this. 100GB of music is conservatively 15,000+ songs. Lets assume these are all purchased as albums and each album (15 songs) costs $10. $10,000 seems like a lot for one normal person to spend on music.

2. Why is having a personal music collection vastly superior to listening to the radio, or other streaming services like Pandora? The latter is free and has sufficient variety.

Even if the cost of music was 1/10th of that, I fail to see how it is any better than simply using on-demand radio. :whiste:

Explain.

1. probably illegally, in majority of cases.
1a. Most probably don't listen to a large part of their collection. Just like to have it there, either to impress others, or to find comfort in a pack rat kind of way.
1b. Most don't pay for it, a lot is copied from friends, or downloaded.
2. Audio quality of streamed music isn't that great, and neither is iTunes downloaded stuff last i checked. Also you get more control over what you listen to. I don't like the idea of someone else choosing what i listen to. I never listen to streamed stuff. Also, you don't need an internet connection to listen to music.

 

[aldamon]

People can get pretty touchy about their hoarding and I see it's starting to happen here. You see the same thing with movies where a dust covered collection of of DVDs/BDs is not enough anymore. Now there has to be a 100TB server holding them, too so the entire collection can be browsed at will.

 

[meltdown75]

whoah calm down there tough guy. I dont think he was saying that you CAN'T and SHOULDN'T do it, he just didn't udnerstand how or why people get to that large of a collection. Take a breather.

dammit, i was all ready for a fight and stuff. *sigh*

ok. the real reason i do it is to annoy him.

 

[Beev]

As was stated back on the first page, piracy. It's far easier to download a bands discography than a single song, and once you have the discography then hell, you might as well keep it.

 

[coloumb]

Very easy to accumulate 100gb of music depending upon the bit rate. I personally prefer the highest quality bit rate which of course takes up a lot more space. All of my music was purchased or acquired legally at one time or another. It's very easy to get a lot of songs for a low cost from subscriptions [Columbia House] or free [50 free song coupon included with a product you buy]. Plus - people rip their own cd's they've collected over the years - or borrow a friend's cd and rip the music to their collection.

Having a music collection - I'd say it's comparable to my Dad's movie collection - he literally can fill up a small bedroom with his collection - Video Tapes, Laser Discs, DVD's, Blu-ray, etc. He buys new releases instead of renting them simply because of accessibility - if he wants to watch a certain movie NOW - he can just go to his collection and watch it without having to wait [netflix] or return it [redbox].

I guess having a music collection means you are in control of what you want to listen to 24/7

 

[coldmeat]

I have about 4gb. Used to have a large collection but realized that I didn't listen to most of it cause it was just complete discographies and I ended up skipping over most songs. Took a couple of days and deleted every song I rarely, or never listen to.

 

[ShadowOfMyself]

Most people seem to download stuff compulsively and they dont know half of the stuff they have, which I think is pretty retarded... I have a pretty big collection AND I can name exactly what x album or x song sounds like, and go down to exact minutes and seconds of a bunch of favourite songs

But thats because I listen to music all the time... If Im home, Im pretty much listening to something, unless Im watching a movie or so

The way I see it, there is so much stuff out there that is worth hearing that I still havent found out, so I have this "musical pursuit" you could say, not exactly like a collector but similar, except I only keep the stuff I REALLY like...

Sometimes I find a band that has this one song I love, but I dont like anything else about them, Im not gonna keep an album just because of that song, its a waste