You spend all weekend thinking about records while cleaning and playing records. Feel like I am going to end up like one of those blokes from the 'Vinyl' documentary by Alan Zweig. There are plenty of guys (yes, guys, not girls) who are worse. Tell me yours....
You listen to at least five albums per day, you don't repeat them that often, and there are albums you haven't heard in over ten years.
You damaged an album cover or the vinyl itself in your sleep when you rolled over on it. Which means that you're sleeping with albums in your bed because there's no room anywhere else (does not apply to people who sleep with their albums because they were listening to them before falling asleep).
You pick up a record or CD in a store, and you actually think, "do I have this?" Then at home, while finding out whether you have that record, you discover some others that cause you to think "Wow, I didn't know I had this!"
Every weekday, unless my mind is preoccupied with a serious family problem, my mind focuses on the upcoming trip to any given record store for that upcoming weekend. It's what keeps me sane as I often find myself gasping for air in the swamp of daily life. I never worry about having too many records or whether or not I'll play the 'new' one often. Going to the record store, I imagine, is like what going to church is to the faithful. As long as there are records, there is hope. ....so I don't know if I'm worse or if we're equals..but we definitely have the same idea of heaven.
Boy, have I done this! My contribution is: ...when you're considering that every music purchase in the future means a removal of something else from the collection.
Buying an album (new or used) you already have, just to have a stock one of that album you already have.
That's where I am now after over 50 years of collecting. Now that I have a nice round 6,800 albums, I'm trying to keep that number for the rest of my life. I feel like my collection is almost complete and I'm really into dipping into the archives and enjoying the ones I have, including rediscovering some I have heard so little that they sound new and fresh to me. If I acquire another one, I'll purge one that I'm not likely to ever listen to again.
When you ask yourself. "How much smaller would my collection be if I had never discovered thrift stores?"
...You count up all your 45's and realize that you could play 10 of them a day and it would take 75 years to get through the collection!
Related and beyond that is buying a record or CD, and getting home and finding out that you did already have it, and would not have bought it again if you remembered for sure. Been there done that.
...You have more copies of the 1978 Kiss Solo Albums in your own collection than copies they actually sold in stores!