Goodbye Old Friends

Variety may be the spice of life, but too much spice can cause indigestion.

Over the past year and some change, since I’ve had my iPod, my music collection has grown significantly; I currently have close to 7,000 songs on it. In general, as has been mentioned here before, I like to just let it play randomly, so I never know what’s going to come up next.

In theory it would be like having my own personal radio station tailored just for me, with no DJ’s talking over the music and no commercials, just song after song of music I like and want to hear.

Recently, I have discovered a hole in this theory, that being that songs keep popping up on my iPod that I don’t actually like. You wonder; how can that be? It’s my iPod, why would I put songs on it that I don’t like.

Well, the answer is very simple; and pretty obvious once you hear it explained. You see, I’ve been collecting music now for over 25 years, starting with vinyl albums and cassette tapes and moving on to CD’s. Back then, when I bought one of the above, I pretty much put it into my player and let it play.

If there was a song that I really despised, I would just skip over it, but for the most part I just listened to the entire album, and songs that I wasn’t sure of eventually just grew on me.

I think that there were 2 main reasons for this:

1. I liked the artist so I gave everything a chance.
2. Like most people, I want variety. I get bored hearing the same stuff over and over again, and back then, there wasn’t as much music so there weren’t as many options, and it wasn’t as easy to acquire all of those options as it is now.

So, I bought what I could afford to buy and continued to listen to it a lot. As the collection grew, so did the variety, but it never seemed to get to a point where I had so many options that I didn’t want to hear things that I was listening to. That is, until now.

Without getting into all of the math, I estimate that with the amount of time I spend listening to my iPod, and the amount of music I have on it, I am only going to hear each song about 3-4 times per year. Back when I was a teenager, I was hearing the same songs 3-4 times per week, and even more with the popular songs that were being played on the radio. It was to a point where I knew almost every word to almost every song I listened to and not only knew what album it was from, but what position it was at on the album.

With the amount of music I have now (and growing), I don’t ever expect to become that familiar with the new music I add, but I would still like to get to a point where, when I hear the song, I know the name of it and who’s doing it. At the rate I’m going now, that may never happen; which brings me back to the topic of songs coming up on my iPod that I don’t like. You see, I have music on my iPod that I have been listening to for years, even decades for some of it. These are songs that I was listening to back when I wanted as much variety as possible but did not have as much as I wanted.

And now that I do have that variety, these are also songs that I am realizing I no longer like, or quite possibly, never even really liked to begin with. Now that I have thousands of songs on my iPod that I’ve only heard a handful of times, and will only hear another handful of times in each coming year, I no longer have (or more accurately want to spend the) time to listen to the familiar songs of my youth that I probably never really liked to begin with, but only listened to because they were there, and as these songs come up on my iPod I am deleting them.

So, as I continue to expand my music collection and to say hello to all of the new and exciting options that are out there, sadly, at the same time I am saying goodbye to many old familiar friends that have been with me for up to 2/3 of my lifetime, but will now be removed from my life forever.