Musical taste

I thought it might be interesting to tally up the number of musical groups or persons for whom I own 2 or more albums. I wondered if this might distill down to a few lines the music I appear to gravitate toward. I was surprised and puzzled. Why do I like Garmarna more than Björk, but have more Björk albums? Weird. This is not to say that I don’t have oodles of tunes by the below artists as partials from their other albums either not yet acquired or still on vinyl or tape. I have some music, but not full albums, by artists I enjoy more than most, but they didn’t make the criteria for this list because I mandated full albums as the breakpoint. Oh well. I’ll save those songs for another list.

Also, I tallied only music I have digitally, on my iPod or computer. What is also interesting is that I have nearly 8,000 songs in my Tunes library. That’s a whole whack, totaling 40GBs of music, but its weird how I sometimes find myself bored with even this quantity. I do listen to about 2 hours of music a day while commuting; that’s roughly 480 hours of listening to music on my iPod per year. To put this in perspective, however, were I to play the whole quantity of music I do have on my iPod without stopping it it would run for nearly 24 days continuously (that’s 576 hours). So it would appear that I listen through close but not all of the music I have in a year, and still I want more. Is that zealous love of music, or pure greed? Or something in between?

Forthwith: (album quantities in brackets)

Tom Waits (14)

David Sylvian (10)

U2 (10)

Kate Bush (9)

Björk (7)

Dead Can Dance (7)

Afro Celt Sound System (6)

Lisa Gerrard (6)

Natacha Atlas (6)

Stuart McLean’s The Vinyl Café (6)

The Tragically Hip (6)