I collect records. I accumulate CDs. There’s a difference.

I love vinyl. I buy it and I treasure it. I don’t have a great deal of it (certainly not by my standards) but that’s because after having collected for the best part of 30 years, I got rid of everything - thousands of records and CDs sold, given away, thrown out and handed on. Then we moved to another country.

Now we’ve been here a few years, I’ve started buying the records again, but I have laid off the CDs. I don’t like them. At least, I don’t like owning them. I used to have over five thousand sitting on shelves. Now I can carry the ‘keepers’ in one hand. To me, they’re just unnecessary clutter, when all that music can just be stored in the same thing I’m currently typing on.

I mean… it’s already digital music, just in a really inconvenient package.

So when I do buy a CD, I think of it as a bucket of music. I get home, tip that music out into my computer and then I’m left with a useless bucket.

Involuntary accumulation
But far more often than buying CDs, they get sent to me. In part, it’s a hangover from my days as a jazz broadcaster. Some of the record labels didn’t get the memo that I no longer play their music on the radio and so CDs quite often turn up in the mail. Every week, a handful of discs turns up in some form or another. Not that I mind… I love getting music. It’s just a job of sorting and filtering.

But I also get sent promos from artists who read my New Music Strategies website. It’s quite often accompanied with a note saying ‘what do you think?’ and ‘it would be great if you could mention us on the blog’.

I don’t review albums or (generally) promote bands on New Music Strategies, so it’s usually a wasted effort on their part as far as a promotional endeavour is concerned - but what it means is there’s a whole pile of CDs I neither sought nor want. Don’t get me wrong - sometimes the music’s great - and I always genuinely appreciate the gesture - but generally, for the amount of music that I get sent, it’s not worth the effort even ripping it to the hard drive and chancing upon it in Shuffle mode. I have an awful lot of music.

Love the music, hate the bucket
But even if I absolutely love it, it’s going on the hard drive, and then the plastic disc and its annoying brittle packaging is just clutter. I do nothing else with it, and I deliberately have no system for filing or storing CDs.

So every now and then, I do a CD purge. A bunch of the more interesting and worthwhile ones get given to friends, some of the more scrappy ones are just thrown out and the rest get taken down to Oxfam.

And that’s where we’re at at the moment. It’s purge time. I’ve still got a pile of 20 albums that I’m interested enough in listening to that they’re sitting in a pile waiting to be ripped to the hard drive. Then they’ll be discarded. There’s a much bigger pile waiting to be given away, and a small handful of CDs that, for one reason or another, I won’t part with. Usually, they have an autograph on them, or they are a souvenir of a particular meaningful event.

Not even out
I DJ from time to time, and I used to carry CDs with me to supplement the vinyl (vinyl’s heavy). But I found that while venues will always maintain turntables and make sure the stylus is good, that same care does not go into CD players and decks. There’s an assumption that CD players are indestructable, when that’s clearly not the case. And I’ve had more embarrassing problems with sticking CDs as a result of a dirty laser lens than I care to recall - so I stopped using them altogether.

Now when I DJ, I take a bag of records and the laptop. I favour the vinyl, but I mix it up with stuff off the laptop.

My ideal promo
But if you want my attention with music, and you want me to collect and treasure it as a physical artefact, then the secret seems to be to release it on vinyl and package it with nice artwork and great liner notes, make sure it’s good jazz, Brazilian or latin music - and if possible, try and record it sometime between 1955 and 1977. That would be lovely.