Do you count non physical product that are in your streaming library as part of "your collection"?

I'm still right about that, by the way. There is no reason to be subjected to all those "influence" tracks every hour. I don't tune in to the Beatles Channel to hear Elvis Presley or Fats Domino, it's jarring when it happens. Not to mention all the covers. It's all paid placement, all designed to make the Beatles and XM some money and get me to stream some Buddy Holly or Joe Cocker, not happening.

 

To be clear, I did not put down book reading; others put down my focus on watching documentaries and films instead of reading history books or fiction. I find the visuals and aurals more compelling, personal preference.

 

Well, you posted this:

That sounded to me as if a book that hasn't been made into a film can't be worth much in the first place, which I would strongly disagree with. Some books just won't work as movies. And even if a movie based on a book turns out great, it can't replace it. It's simply a different medium. I say this as a lover of both.

Of course it's totally ok if you prefer movies or documentaries to books. No question.

 

I do the 15 dollar Apple Music family plan too.

 

I disagree. Whether or not a song is "lousy" is in the eye of the beholder. You keep making it sound like somehow it's an objective thing - no, it's not.

 

This. I've always been more of a singles guy. I like my albums, but I was weaned on singles. And, hit radio gives you more of a variety to listen to rather than just one artist and album at a time.

Sometimes i'll be in the mood to just hear one song. It's all I need at the time. Some other times, I like to hear a whole album and maybe skip one or two songs. I don't understand these people who think you have to listen to an album in its entirety just because it's there.

 

No way in hell.

 

It doesn't matter. But at the same time, what's wrong with mentioning that people use the tools differently from others? There's nothing "wrong" with listening to songs rather than albums - it just means you're a different type of listener to people like myself.

But I never reduce music to being "bumps in a Vinyl groove". There's a whole lot more to Vinyl than bumps in a groove. There's a whole lot more to collecting vinyl than simply saying "I collect bumps in grooves". Just as you can't have a novel without words, doesn't mean it's accurate to suggest a novel is just words - it's too reductionist, it strips the novel of its meaning.

I know we live in a digital world, but it's fascinating that there are people who truly don't see any difference between a physical collection, and a list of files on a computer or service. Strange times when the difference is right there in your face.

 

For me, my list of files that have been curated and built upon since I started becoming old enough to use computers in the early 2000's, are just as much a collection as anybody's room full of vinyl or CDs! These are all files I have either downloaded, imported, sought after, or have been sent by friends over the years and each one has the

With streaming, I consider it more a catalogue you access more than a collection you build, but I personally see collecting digital downloadable localized files as just as much a collection as anything else

 

Fair enough.

We disagree, but that's not important. It's all about opinions. I think you and I disagree on some fundamentals of what constitutes a "collection". I mean, I could go to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and see lots of original paintings from the great man, or I could go to a local flea market and buy a set of reproductions of his works - but for me one is a collection, the other is just a bunch of copies. The copies might elicit the same emotional response when I look at them, but they're in no way a substitute for having the real thing (or in this case, going to see the real thing, since a Van Gogh is probably a little too expensive to have at home. )

Curation is another interesting point. Normally we curate within restrictions of time and budget. If I could accept files as being the same thing, I'm not sure there's a whole lot of point in real curation. You can download so much music, why bother doing much curating? Storage is cheap. As far as files go - and I do have music on my computer - I don't have to put half as much thought into what I grab.

In fact, it seems to me that you're saying anyone can own a collection, at any time, for zero cost. Not only that, they can go from having no music, to having a collection, in a matter of hours, depending on their bandwidth constraints. I can only accept such an argument by redefining what it means to have a collection, and blurring the edges of what "curation" means in this context.

For the record, I feel the same about books. A 1000 titles on your Kindle isn't a collection in the same way a library of physical copies would be.

 

Yeah agree to disagree in that aspect- although I do see where you are coming from. For me, all in all music is different than a Van Gogh Museum in the sense that the music itself is the most important part as opposed to the container that holds it - that the literal sound waves hitting your ears is the "real thing" while any physical tangible representation of it is more a subjective add-on based on whoever has the personal preference for it

I have vinyl and CDs, and plenty of them at that - however my local digital music library holds as much legitimacy and "realness" as they do when it comes to being a music collection. If we are talking about vinyl collections or CD collections, that is specific and is its own thing, but to me "music collection" is simply the music you own as opposed to the container it is in

To me there are two qualifiers for a music collection: do you own it? and is it music? Then yes, you are collecting music.

 

Oh, it's not about the container. Not at all. I think what you're describing is the difference between collecting and listening. You can listen to music in many different ways - live, Vinyl, CD, or just humming along to a tune in your head. That's all listening to music. It doesn't have anything to do with collecting music, though (imo).

Take books. A novel is a bunch of words strung together. Is a Kindle version of that the same as a paper book? Well, no - again, imo. A first edition copy of JG Ballard's Crash will always be more valuable than a paperback version released last week. The Granada set of paperbacks will always be my favorites over subsequent versions. I have a version of Cocaine Nights where I hate the font they used, etc. Yet you could argue they're all the same since the words are strung together in the same way and the plot is the same. You could say that someone with one version is getting the same experience than myself with my preferred copy. You could - but I don't think you can argue it's the same experience. Is reading a hardback book the same as reading a paperback? Same words, right? Yet - for me not the same.

I might also mention that virtual worlds aren't the same as the real world. Those zero's and ones might be the same in the medium of air, but the very act of stamping them upon a disc makes then intrinsically different.

I guess I just don't get this reduction that is taking place. Bits on a hard disc are binary, and bits on a CD are binary, and therefore they're the same thing. Or that as long as the sound waves enter your ears, it's the same thing no matter where those waves originated from. It strikes me as absurd - but I'm learning a lot of people agree with you. You learn something every day - right? Honestly though, I think we're simply talking about different things and defining terms and words differently. For me, buying and listening to Peter Gabriel's debut album, be it Vinyl, CD, SACD, Blu-Ray - whatever, is not the same as hearing it over the radio....... Sure some properties are the same, but it's not actually the same. Besides, one is listening, the other is collecting, which are different things entirely.

 

Not your lifestyle. But your habit of expressing yourself with "big" statements that are often grotesque.
That you don't read is one thing, that you brag about it is another.

I am not the first to point out that your comments - which would probably be interesting - are diluted (to stay polite) by your tendency to exaggerate and say things that probably go beyond your thoughts and don't make you seem particularly clever. And don't get me started on your obsession with telling us about your wealth and your professional successes...

Your latest comment about the Beatles Channel is epecially, how should I put it, spacey : "I don't tune in to the Beatles Channel to hear Elvis Presley or Fats Domino, it's jarring when it happens. Not to mention all the covers. It's all paid placement, all designed to make the Beatles and XM some money and get me to stream some Buddy Holly or Joe Cocker, not happening."
That's the kind of statements that makes us wonder if you're here only for the attention...
BTW, do you know how many hours of studio recordings by the Beatles there are? I'll let you think about that...

 

Oh, I see what you did there. Keep practicing.

 

I'll go farther and say, why should anyone care about albums at all? The album as a unit of music is an accident of marketing and technology. Artists responded to new technologies -- first recording technology itself, then the long playing microgroove LP -- and new marketing ideas -- packaging the LP as a unit of music -- by writing or assembling material for the new format, and the album as a creative unit of music was born. It's a blip in the history of music, a response of artists to the industrial situation of a particular time. No one wrote an "album" as a musical thing for thousand years of recorded human history -- Bach never wrote an album, Beethoven never wrote an album, Robert Johnson never wrote an, Hank Williams never wrote an album, Django Reinhardt never wrote an album.

I don't actually think the age of the album is over considering the way artist are still making, and even expanding on the nature of, albums. But I don't think it's a big deal if the age of the album is over. Now we're in a different industrial situation and artists will respond to changing technology and industrial demands with new and different creative ideas. Thing change. Life and art go on in new and different ways.

 

Why not all music I ever enjoyed is my library?

 

A collection of copies or reproductions is still a collection which is, to cite one definition, "an accumulation of objects gathered for study, comparison, or exhibition or as a hobby." Van Gogh actually had a lot of published reproductions and magazine reproductions of other artists' works that he saved and collected and studied. That was a collection for him.

The issue really is, is a digital file an "object," and then, whether it is or isn't, is the requirement that something be a physical item in order to be collected an obsolete definition of "collection" in the digital age?

Also, worth considering, records and CD are copies. They're punched out by the thousands or millions in industrial processes, each basically the same as the one before and the one after it on the line. There are exceptions of course, like Wu Tang Clan's Once Upon a Time in Shaolin or items where all known copies have been lost, but for the most part a copy of an album one might have in one's collection is not unique. It's one of tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of extant copies. It's more like the printed repro of the Van Gogh you buy at the flea market, in that way, than it is like the original Van Gogh canvas.

FWIW, I don't think Van Gogh paintings are a great example here -- I don't think you'd get the same emotional response looking at the copies as you'd get form looking at the originals. There's so much human struggle right on the surface of Van Gogh's work, especially the later stuff from Arles and Saint-Remy, with a thick impasto of paint in rapidly laid on layers of swirls and curves -- you don't really see that or feel the impact of it from the flat reprints, looking at the canvases is a very different experience vs. looking at photographic reprints. By contrast, if you listen to the same recording in the same resolution over the same system blind as to the source -- CD or 16/44.1 digital file from a computer or 16/44.1 digital file from a streaming platform -- the experience of hearing the music will be basically identical, where the experience of looking at the reprints of Van Gogh vs. the canvases will be different I think.

 

I gotta disagree. The popular album was going to happen - it was the logical longform unit of popular music.

If you want to refer back to the classical composers, many of them wrote 'suites' which were based on the same essential principle, which is that a lot of people enjoy the longform. The Nutcracker Suite, The Four Seasons, The Planets, Water Music - these were the albums back then.

 

As long as it's there when I want to play it, it's in my collection.

 

But if you're a streamer, it's there as long as you keep paying or as long as they don't remove it for some reason - so how does that fit?

 

A digital file is a physical object. Is it part of your collection? Well, do you still have it if you unplug your internet?

 

Yup, I say the same.

 

If I bought an album, regardless of format, then yes. Those who have grown up with digital and have amassed a number of digital albums on their own hard drive or flash drive... that is theirs, they have a collection.

As others have pointed out, a subscription to a streaming service allows you to rent but not own, so I don't count this in my collection regardless of how useful I find streaming for discovering new music. I personally do not count singles, but I would not argue if others did.

 

I don’t think streams are part of a music collection. To me, the question is, who cares? Why does it matter?

And also, I have a massive music collection of LPs and CDs and have come out the other end. To me, the question is, why collect at all? Why is it important to amass a set of physical objects? It is quite possible to enjoy something and have a very deep knowledge and appreciation of something, and to enjoy it with total attention, without amassing physical objects.

 

If you enjoy something, that creates the importance to you. It's purely subjective as with all matters of art and pleasure.