I think my end collection size goal is about 2,000 LPs. I have probably 1700 or so total albums I wish to eventually own, but some of those I’ll keep multiple copies of; stereo/mono, original/reissue etc. might actually end up closer to 2,400 or so if I had to estimate. I’m currently in the 900s, but I have several hundred more records which I’m aware of that I want to own, and definitely several hundred more of which I’m not yet aware or haven’t taken a liking to yet that I’m sure I’ll eventually want to own a copy of.
I haven't reached that number yet. I'm on my third big purge in the past 3 years (3-500 going out the door each time) and somehow I have more than when I started!
I might as well chime in as one of the people who owns over 10,000 LPs and a roughly equivalent number of CDs. To begin with, my wife and I are both music obsessives first and record collectors second. We're not the sorts who buy multiple copies of the same album, because why do that when there are so many other albums we also want to hear? (In another thread recently, someone mentioned that he owns 50 copies of Elvis Costello's Armed Forces: that is one of my all-time favorite records and I can't imagine owning more than MAYBE two copies, one of the US tracklisting and one of the UK.) Also, we're childless, we live in a fully paid-for three-story home with plenty of storage space, and we have no expensive hobbies. I say we have no expensive hobbies because I don't consider records an expensive hobby. We did not buy all these records and CDs in the last six months: I started buying records in 1974, my wife started buying records in 1964, and because we've both taken relatively decent care of our collections, we still have those first records. I can count on one finger of one hand the number of albums I own that cost over $100: a copy of a much-coveted industrial musical that usually sells for over $400 on Discogs, which I got for $250 because I don't think the seller knew what she could have listed it for. The next most expensive is a mono WLP of my all-time favorite jazz album, which I paid $75 for, and which sounds exquisite. Except for box sets (never a huge interest of mine, honestly), there is not a single LP in this house that I've paid more than about $40 for, and those are rare. (My wife, a devoted ethnomusicologist with a particular interest in the Balkan countries, has probably spent more for some of her rarer treasures.) For all that people moan about vinyl prices these days, probably 90% of the new albums I buy cost around $20. As for the older albums, I bought by far the most of my used vinyl collection between 1990 and 2005, when people got rid of thousands upon thousands of VG+ to M LPs because they bought the hype that CDs were better. Thanks to stores like Bow Wow Records in Albuquerque, where I regularly walked out with foot-high stacks of rare LPs for $20, I was able to take advantage of that. Because of this, neither of us see owning thousands of LPs or CDs as a burden or a hardship, any more than we think it's weird that we own books that we've read once and will probably never open again. The concept of "I can listen to every record in my collection in a year!" is just...baffling. The other side of this is that because we've spent so little on any single record in our collection, we deaccession LPs and CDs without a second thought. If I've listened to an album I spent five bucks on in 1987 even once...I've gotten my five bucks' worth out of that album. So if I come across it in the stacks and think "Yeah, I'm not ever gonna listen to that again," out on the sidewalk it goes. (LPs disappear immediately off the sidewalk, no matter what they are -- these days, CDs usually end up going out on trash day because no one has picked them up in the meantime.) In fact, given that we've been using streaming more and more for our casual listening, we're probably going to end up purging several thousand LPs to go along with the hundreds of CDs that have gone out in the last year or so.
I tried to stay around 5,000 for half a dozen years (This number is from 50 years of collecting albums.). I was constantly culling my collection. After eliminating a third of them to make room for new ones, I gave up. While still always culling, now my goal is to stay under 6,000. There is just too many new (at least to me) bands out there. Yesterday I learned of The Pimps of Joytime. Wonderful soul revival music. Funkier than schitt. They have two LPs available through Popmarket. I'm streaming them now to make sure I want to buy them. I can already tell you I do.
This is why I will never buy a record without first checking Discogs. I don't know how many times I bought a double or triple or even something I thought I needed an upgrade for only to get home and kick myself. Prices are high enough now that I'd rather take the time to check rather than get burned. Just a few days ago I almost bought a Goats Head Soup that had a beat copy of 12x5 in it just, for $5, because the sleeve was in such good condition and I remembered by sleeve was half destroyed. But I checked Discogs, to be sure, and there it was my sleeve is just fine. I had already found an upgrade and had forgotten about it.
I'll never know. CD's came along by the time I owned perhaps 400 LP's, and the higher list prices of the new medium adjusted my priorities. Now I'm over 2,000 CD's, maybe 40% of my LP's are duplicated in that stash, and nothing seems to have stopped me from deciding I want more of them when the opportunity arises. But then, a lot of this excess is due to my career. And not everybody I know who wore headphones to work, has this compulsion I do.
For my personal LP collection - I've found 700 to 800 is a 'good working number' for a normal-size LP collection. Maybe 1000 max if you have the space. It's a personal decision really. If you have 'plenty of space', like a man cave for example... you could go up much higher if you were a serious collector of LPs, like many thousands. I've seen many collections in Japan in the multiples of many 1000s. It kind of blows ya away really. And much of their collection is 'original pressing' jazz LPs that are worth a small fortune nowadays! It's amazing to see it in volume really. There aren't any walls, only record spines in racks! And they know exactly where everything is. Amazing.
Based on your wife's interest I will share this story, a few years ago I was at a car boot sale and got into a conversation with a seller, this led to a visit to his father's garage that afternoon, the father had moved into a care home and the son was clearing the house. In the garage were a few hundred LPs, nothing exciting, but some interesting ethnographic albums from the 1950s, what was fascinating was hundreds and hundreds of foreign 78s. The father had worked for a major chemical company throughout the world, but mainly in Greece and the Balkans, it seemed he had become obsessed with local music stretching back to the thirties or possibly earlier, I have no idea when it comes to Greek or Cyrillic alphabets, but I do know acetates and privately recorded discs, this guy had lots of discs he'd had copied, I'm assuming the originals were extremely rare even in the period he was collecting immediately post-war, some may even have been private recordings he'd arranged. I didn't have to know the music to realise this was an important and possibly unique collection and I made a serious effort to purchase it, unfortunately the son's intent was to donate it to his father's former university and all I could do was strongly suggest he ensured it would be appreciated and looked after rather than end up in landfill unwanted and unappreciated.
For me, zero. My collection consists of about 3500 albums in high-res (minimum 16/44.1) and includes many higher-res vinyl rips. Best of all, it takes up about as much room as a hard-cover book. I still have a handful of CDs and buy them now and again, but I love my 21st-century digital collection. I do love vinyl rips though; I can never have too many of those. Way cheaper too, and play perfectly every time with absolutely no wear and tear.
I find this interesting as I consider a "moderate" collection in the 5000 area and "large" would be 10k+. Which probably says a lot more about me than what your numbers say about you. A year ago I was at around 6000 and I purged down to 3800'ish (which is now back up to around 4k). I did find with 6000 records that the music I didn't listen to was getting in the way of the music I did. But that was as much a function of available storage space as it was the overall record count. IMO the size isn't the problem it's the ability to keep it organized and easily accessible.
Speaking in regards to records as more generally being 'albums' than format-specific. Minority of the poll, but I'd say 0-300. I've found that when I have a pretty small but tidy collection I tend to listen a lot more than when I have a rather large collection and become more consumed with collecting. I've gone back to using a perhaps now "oldschool" 6-disc cd changer and may listen to the same few albums over and over for a while. Some of them I've had in there for months and given dozens of listens.
300-600 I mean you can keep track and clean the records and got the chance to listen those more than once in a lifetime
