jstn:

Rebuttal to a rebuttal:

I hate when the default attitude of a dissenting rebuttal is “Cut off your hands!” My response is just as reasonable as the request — the author himself thanked me for my perspective — but I’m sorry that you disagree with it.

I still don’t see why the answer to “how do I clean my house” is “burn it down.”

I would have thought the creator of Muxtape would realise how instrumental the web can be in feeding listening habits. Websites and services like Hype Machine and elbo.ws make it trivial to find anything current and listen to it right there and then, and in most cases, even download it. Services like Amazon MP3 and whatever else is in wide use right now (I don’t use these services) make getting anything on a major label trivial. The list goes on: MySpace, Virb, iMeem, and, once upon a time, Muxtape.

Again, that’s fine if you’re only interested in listening to “current” music or music on major labels. For me, that’s only a small subset of what I listen to. I buy music on Amazon (a habit from before iTunes went mostly DRM-free), but even then you can only download it once. If deleted it I’d have to pay again to hear it again. I’ve also got tons and tons of stuff that will probably never show up on Amazon. Live stuff, stuff from vinyl and cassettes, stuff made by myself or friends, etc. The internet will never, ever completely replace a personal collection no matter how awesome it gets.

To restate my previous point (did you miss it?), there’s no way anyone has time to listen to that much music. Four digits of gigabytes must encompass months of continuous listening. That’s a collector’s library, not a listener’s. How much of your four gigabyte library has less than ten plays? Do you really think you’re making valuable use of your disk space by filling it with music on the offchance that you may want to listen to it some day? I don’t. But it’s fine if we disagree, I still don’t think that makes me as stupid as you’re trying to make me sound.

Lots of it probably only has one or two plays. And yeah, I do think it’s valuable use of the disk space, which is phenomenally cheap for the convenience. 1TB drives are $80 and falling, the price of 5 commercial CDs. I wasn’t trying to make you sound stupid, I was trying to point out that the “precious disk space” argument is weak. Also, I think it’s unfair to assume a “collector” and a “listener” are mutually exclusive identities. A lot of people who listen to music also collect it. I am one of them.

Another gem of advice from the same guy: “If you deleted something you ripped from a CD, rip it again next time you want it.” Seriously? Why rip it at all?

Because I was responding to a guy that was asking about organising his iTunes library.

When I wrote this, I was responding to one person publicly, not trying to cater to everyone’s music collections. But since you asked: convenience (what’s easier — a spotlight search or scanning a wall of CDs?), security (what if I drop it, break it, lose it, burn it, etc?), and generosity (what if I lend it to someone?). The list goes on.

Those all seem like reasons to leave it ripped on your hard disk, rather than ever deleting it. That goes for iTunes or any other type of library.

One more: “MP3s are a fantastic way to archive your music (but FLAC and OGG are better)”. No, they’re not. Esoteric formats, even if they’re super OMG high fidelity, are usually a terrible choice for long-term storage of any kind of data. MP3s are about as universal as it gets, and they support ID3 tags, which is an organizational godsend that FLAC and OGG lack.

This is a personal preference. I’m not wrong, and neither are you. I merely mentioned the formats as a popular choice for another crowd of music-listeners.

No, you said those formats were good a choice “to archive your music”, and you’ve made it clear that you put archivists and listeners into different categories. But you’re right, it’s a personal preference. I still think if your primary interest is organization (especially a large collection) FLAC has serious disadvantages. It has serious disadvantages for listeners too, but that’s another discussion.

I was reminded of something Alex Payne wrote a little while ago, albeit in a different context: “If you want to store data of differing types within a lightweight organization system, I encourage you to check out the filesystem.” That’s how I do it. I’ve only got ~50GB in my iTunes library at any given time, but I keep everything else in a simple hierarchy on an external RAID. No fancy groupings or playlists, just a folder for each artist with a folder inside for each album (or loose tracks). That’s it. iTunes starts to choke after a few thousand songs, but the total filesystem limit on a Mac is in the billions. You’ll never hit the ceiling.

I don’t know which version of my post you read, but this was more or less exactly what I suggested as an alternative to deleting everything.

I concede that we both ultimately recommend moving stuff to an external hard drive, but I think that only weakens your argument for deleting.

Sorry for the rant. This is an issue close to my heart :)

I don’t know why a rant was necessary, Tumblr’s pretty good at fostering good old-fashioned discussion, but no problem! Looks like we’re mostly in agreement on the major points!

By ‘rant’ I really meant a long text post of any sort, which seems to go against Tumblr’s usual quick, ephemeral rhythm. In any case, thanks for the gentlemanly spar :)

Just to add a couple more points to (what I perceive as) Justin’s perspective:

• I love making mixes, for long car rides, specific events, particular moods, whatever. Multiple categories and an obsession with ID3 tagging make it very easy for me to find songs that don’t jump into mind immediately. Consistent Artist/Album/Year etc with a broad Genre classification (Rock, Hip Hop, Jazz, and very few others) with sub-genres, moods, and other random information appended to the comments with a Doug’s Applescript (ie, *postpunk *gritty *british). Lets me view all the music objectively as input for subjective mixes.
• I don’t want to “archive” my music, for the reasons discussed above. I also like being able to quickly view my personal library for insight into how I got to like a band, or to listen to a forgotten classic album. I dig back through constantly. It’s the same reason I prefer buying paperbacks to utilizing the library: I like having a physical reminder of “what I know” to jog my memory.

Music Discovery Thoughts

I have a lot of thoughts on the music industry, some scattershot and incomplete, some fully formed and mostly coherent. Mostly I default to my standard media observation that the only important entities are the content producer and the consumer, with every middleman and distribution network on the chopping block at all times.

Music discovery is incredibly important in the successful propagation of acts and genres, and I’m fascinated by how quickly this process is evolving on the internet (in sharp contrast to the record industry’s death rattle protests). I like to blend objective and subjective assessments whenever possible, and both angles are well-represented.

Objectively, I love digging through Allmusic.com’s extensive database for recommendations of similar artists, threads connecting acts through genre development, and their extensive tagging discipline. Pandora is similarly objective in their goal of mapping the musical qualities of artists/songs/albums and spitting out a playlist of similarly constructed tracks. Last.fm and iTunes Genius depend heavily on the ‘neighbor’ principle, assuming that songs played together or in playlists by one user will lead to useful recommendations for someone with similar taste.

Subjective recommendations tend to be a bit murkier to pinpoint, but operate mostly on a trust ideal. Friends who I judge to have good taste in music will have an overwhelming impact on what I listen to, and radio stations that have established a particular sound will be trusted as well. The rise of mp3 blogs has multiplied this on the web, adding the instant impact of embedded tracks playable on demand. The Tumblr dashboard’s audio posts have an especially “sticky” quality, as the player is consistent visually, the users are “trusted” bloggers that I chose to follow, and the presentation in the timeline prompts an almost Pavlovian response to click play and listen to at least a minute or so of the track.

Despite what the record industry middlemen may claim, music creation is alive and well. Distribution networks and music discovery services are flourishing and evolving at a rapid (if anarchistic) pace, and even if monetization models are proving difficult to pinpoint, it probably has far more to do with the machinations of the record industry than it does with consumers. Viva la revolucion.