Funnily enough I consider myself a listener first and collector second, collecting allows me to be the former, I've never streamed and rarely bother with CDs, if I want to listen to music then I pretty much have to own it on record, likewise if I think I may want to listen to that music sometime in the future I will need to own it and one lesson I have learned is to buy vinyl on release, or when you see it, rather than some future time when it may well be impossible to find or very expensive, if you decide you don't want that now ten-year-old record you purchased new you generally make a nice profit. Have I played every record I own, no, but others I have played over one hundred times either way at least I have options, sometimes I can play fifteen or twenty LPs in a day, other days I may play none, I don't know what my average is, but I'm planning to get in a position to play 10-15 records a day pretty much every day and read more books as well. How far through my collection I will get in this life I do not know, but that's not the point, being in a position to play whatever I want or scan my shelves for something new to me has been my intent all along, and I've pretty much achieved that.
I don't know about the answer to this, but it's a good thread to share with my wife: "This is a quantitative study, which shows that based on 353 responses from a highly diverse set of participants given nationality, age, social status and gender (right??), the ideal number of records to own is definitely higher than 1000, and the most common answer was N+1".
I have about 1200 CD and 50 records. I will pare down CDs at some stage but years ago I got rid of about 50 early Warp label etc records that I regret ever since which has stopped me getting rid of excess CDs now. I switched hundreds into poly sleeves which has cut down on storage. Rebuilding those early 90s electronica records is too expensive now which is disappointing.
I guess the number is going to be some factor of what your budget and size of home will allow, consideration of the people in your life, and how varied your listening preferences are... If I didn't enjoy classical music, for example, I could get by with many fewer (sigh). This is actually on my mind because I'll be building a shelf for my collection later this week and I will only have space to store 500 or so of the 700 records I own, so things are going to get a bit fractured and inelegant. Seems like many of you have had some room freed up by kids leaving the house, perhaps some day.
Maybe 300-500 of my favorites but I’d be cutting some out.I am trying to update my storage so I can get to everything easier and reduce the clutter.
I stopped buying records other than the odd one around 2010 due to financial constraints, lack of space (with majority put in storage) and thinking I didn't really "need" many additions to the 2-3k I already had. Result was I stopped listening to the whole collection, but oddly once I started buying again regularly, I found myself playing the existing collection much more too. So turns out buying more was a need.
If you're throwing the Wife into the equation then it'll be N-1. 'N' being the number of LP's at which the Wife says that's enough.
Relative to my interests and my bank account, I could see myself end up with 600-1000 physical LPs. I have a collection of around 150, but I could easily drop maybe 25 of them without noticing someone replaced them with albums I've never heard of - ideally though, with space considerations and my bias towards digital locally stored music in the age where we can have literally thousands of lossless albums, I'm more than okay leaving the "I'll get around to it" albums where they make the most sense as someone into this hobby seriously for just over a decade. There's simply way too much "good" music to genuinely love if I'm to end up being here in 2052 talking about the 80th anniversary of Supper's Ready
Around 300 vinyl titles will do for me. I recently got over a bit of a psychological hurdle by culling and selling some vinyl. To be frank, some of it was not special or rare, but some of it was. We may be renovating soon and it will be good to clear out some stuff, so I began with some of these albums. I’ve bought the vast majority used and very cheaply, so any money I get back is likely to be more than I paid for them. A vinyl collection takes up room, is heavy to move and it doesn’t all need to be in the house if it is not listened to regularly by me. Albums by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and The Beatles are staying where they are. The rest are fair game. It’s a pain to sell them on eBay, on Facebook Marketplace or at a record shop (though the latter is the option I took). Sometimes I thought about having a table in the driveway, just to get rid of them quickly….a vinyl lemonade stand sort of deal. Then I woke up. I’m realising that I don’t care about this stuff and it feels amazing, mainly because I never spent big on it in the first place. It was never an investment. The used CD’s I find are the replacement for buying vinyl reissues - I can buy a lot more CD’s, in many types of genres. The few vinyl reissues I buy are those where I love either the artwork, music or both. Prices for vinyl are just crazy in my estimation, which helps to decide the issue. Sometimes I think about buying all the LP’s by the Aussie cult band ‘King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’ and putting them away in a drawer for 10 years, just to make money, then I realise I’m not that sort of a person. I collect music to hear it and often to appreciate the artwork too. It’s not to be taken seriously from the investment point of view, but rather from the music point of view. I’m a musician and have always appreciated the act of creation for the statement it is.
Other than a disagreement on the number, I love this post. Vinyl prices, generally, are way too high - but when you've got people willing to pay $120 for a single album then the whole "supply and demand" thing gets warped. There's a bunch of things I'd buy on Vinyl if the price was right, say between £15 and £20. I do get some in my range, but generally I find I can't. It's just the modern market.
In theory, the correct answer to the poll is ‘thousands’. Maybe millions. But, then of course, you run into the reality of: — Limited storage space. — Very considerable expense. — Time. If you have 1000s of records, it’ll take you years (decades?) to hear ‘em all. So, like it or not, correct answer is ‘hundreds’. Now that that’s settled, the line to kick me for being realistic forms to the left. .
Insteresting topic. I need to consider it under space perspective. My "space budget" is a kallax 5x5 and the furniture where the sound system is installed. So about 70 lps per cell x 25 = 1750 lps and 250 others in the furniture. My limit is therefore about 2000 and I need to add about 500 cds and 200 eps in 7". I think it's not so bad because I miss time to listen them...
Noooooooo! 3-4 a day @ 30-40 mins is only a couple of hours a day, so over a 1000 per year easy. Anyway, who listens to whole albums? Correct answer is indeed thousands!
You're measuring it all wrong. Some people have the money and space to store thousands of records, others have space for a few hundred or less. You have too many when you are living outside your means and it comes at the cost of a comfortable life for you and/or your partner. Additionally, I don't believe it's possible to listen regularly to thousands of records. I probably have a few hundred records I listen to often; the remaining I listen to fairly often, but many I listen to rarely. There's simply not enough time in my life to listen to albums I find 'okay' and there's a lot if great music out there...
