I once had a massive music CD collection. I love music. I love (or subconsciously feel a need) to collect music almost as much as I love music itself. Mind you, I can't play any instrument other than a CD player and/or an iPod, but nonetheless I need noise around me all the time. Probably has to do with being an only child of deaf parents.
I got my first CD player in 1991, when I was 15. In my sophomore year of high school a friend convinced me to join a mail-order music CD catalog/"club." Every music club had an introductory offer that would usually give you a minimum of 6 CDs for free when you sign up as long as you purchased a pre-determined number of albums over the course of a year. When I realized they would send me offers to re-join once I fulfilled my obligation and quit the "club" and that they'd also send me offers with my name misspelled as if I were a different living person, I signed up with all the major music clubs with every offer they gave to take advantage of all the free CDs. By the time I was a freshman in college, I had five concurrent music club memberships. By the time I would have been a sophomore in college (4 years after I got my first CD player), I had literally over a thousand CDs. Around that time, I needed some quick cash during a jobless dry spell, so I sold over half of them at $5 or $10 each, drastically reducing my music CD collection. I went through the cycle again a few years later in 1997, just before I moved to California because believe it or not, boxes of about 200 CDs in each box is quite heavy and cumbersome to transport. A few years after that, I once again built my CD collection to well over a thousand CDs, losing (or ridding) only a significant portion to my ex-wife during our separation.
By the early 2000's the MP3 file format had been gaining attention, becoming easily accessible with Napster and software for ripping CDs. I found a new collection addiction. However, just like the physical media storage space was at a premium. Buying extra hard drive storage wasn't that cheap. So when it came to another round of reducing my CD collection, I would rip the CDs before selling them. But I could only rip my favorite songs from those CDs. I didn't have space for the entire album to be ripped. So I would keep my favorite CDs as a whole and for crap albums like The Real McCoy, I would only rip "Another Night" and "Runaway." Over time though, my cherished collection of CDs—ones that I would keep because there were enough songs on the CD as a whole that I would want to keep it—increased to a excessive number again taking up too much physical space. In an effort to reduce space, I would buy those big binders for holding just CDs and I threw out all the jewel cases. Even though I have an MP3 collection that is now over 500GB in size, I still have those two big binders plus a few stacks of CDs I've purchased since the great jewel case purge of 2008.
But now I have hard drive space. Lots of it. Storage is cheap these days. I have a media server serving as my central repository for all my photos, music and videos with a backup plan for that data. So I can finally rip ALL of what's left of my CDs. Not just the favorite songs, but the lame ones as well. This will be quite a task, but it falls in line with my resolution this year to reduce clutter. What a sense of accomplishment I'll have when I finish this project!
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