I am not musically gifted - I wish I were! - and my musical taste is apparently questionable. Or at least many people have told me that I have no discernment. I shrug such comments off. Musical taste is a very personal thing, and I feel that my preferences are as valid as anyone else's. In any case, my aim has mostly been to put together the 'soundtrack of my life', which necessarily includes some things that might make many a proper music buff shudder or cringe. But then, it's my life and my soundtrack, and not theirs.
And besides, there's an important medical aspect. I rather fancy that, if and when I begin to get senile, playing those tracks of mine will jerk me back into full recollection, and revive sweet or exciting memories. Seriously.
I am at least open to new musical experiences, and do occasionally admit some strange stuff into my collection. A friend will play something, or I hear it when shopping; I find out what it is and add it.
Ah, my collection. It's only a small one: 1,851 tracks, all in mp3 format, bought and downloaded and free of playing restrictions, so that I can transfer them easily from one device to another. As they are stored on physical media (primarily the microSD card in my phone) and not streamed, I avoid paying subscriptions to have access. I will always be able to hear my music anytime, anywhere - and forever, so long as I have a charged-up device.
About a third of those 1,851 tracks were ripped long ago from pop CDs. This was when I had a desktop PC - or a laptop - that could play them. My current laptop, bought in 2016, can't play CDs - and therefore can't copy them. So from 2016 it's been impossible for me to rip music tracks from a CD. But this hasn't been a major concern, because I'd already ripped whatever I needed well before 2016. Indeed, once I'd copied the tracks I wanted, the actual CDs were redundant. I binned them all some time ago, as part of a decluttering exercise.
The remaining two-thirds of my music collection has mostly been bought online, then downloaded - one at a time, or in small batches - from Amazon. This has been going on for years, but has gradually got more difficult. As chronicled in several posts in recent years, Amazon has long wanted its customers to sign up to one of its subscription packages, and has by degrees made it harder to make small one-off music track purchases.
More lately an ongoing tussle with Google has made Amazon stop customers buying mp3 tracks using an app on their Android phone. Two giants slugging it out, with the customer as the loser. The current workaround is to use a browser on one's phone or laptop and buy mp3 tracks from Amazon's website - then download them. This done, they can be copied elsewhere. The process - the precise sequence of steps to take - isn't intuitive, but it works.
Anyway, I have a collection amounting to 1,851 tracks. It includes almost all the music that ever meant anything to me. There must still be tracks from, say, the 1960s or 1970s - or later - that ought to be added, but I'm scratching my head to think of any. I've already got down to the dregs, so to speak.
So the vast collections of music offered by this or that subscription service have no attraction for me. Nearly all that music would be irrelevant to my personal life-experiences or associations. I dare say that there is much I've never heard that I might find appealing, if I ever explored such a monumental archive. If, that is, I were music-curious and were willing to throw an extraordinary amount of time at it! But I'm not music-curious, and don't have oodles of time, and I'm unwilling to pay an ongoing monthly fee for something I might never get round to doing.
It strikes me anyway that you can have too much music. I listen to my own small collection every day, a few tracks at a time, and it takes me 190-odd days (that is, over six months) to hear all 1,851 tracks, playing them in alphabetical song-title order. If I had 3,500 tracks, it might therefore take me a year to hear them all just once. What then would be the point of a collection of 10,000 tracks, so that I'd get to hear each one only once every three years?
So I think it must be a waste of money to pay for streamed access to millions of tracks. It would take too many lifetimes to get even reasonable value from the ongoing outlay. How could anyone trawl through even a small fraction of the music available? Surely, just as there is an upper limit on the number of close friends you can pay proper attention to, so there is only so much time and appreciation and proper attention you can give to music.
I suppose - not being a passionate music lover - I am missing the point. What I can say is that any search for music on Amazon seems to throw up a lot of dross. It would be galling to discover that this is general for most of the many millions of tracks in Amazon's music archive. I don't want to waste my life - and money - dipping endlessly into the boring or second-rate.
Need I say it? Not one of my 1,851 tracks is boring or second-rate to me. And if you were me, you'd agree.
