CD clearance

I’ve been a mission this month, trying to have a huge clearout of many of the books and CDs that I’ve hoarded over the years.

With the books it’s not so much of an issue – Each one made a solid impression, and it’s fairly clear which ones I’m going to read again.

With CDs however, I’m finding it more difficult, as each one isn’t so much an overall product, but the sum of many individual moments each with their own musical merits. Which is a poncey way of saying ten tracks on an album may be rubbish, but I’ve kept it for that one killer moment that I can’t bring myself to part with.

But lent alone keeping it for maybe 10% of the content, the very idea of keeping all this music on CD is archaic and unnecessary anyway. I could quite easily just copy the individual tracks I like onto my computer and be done with the shiny, space-invading slabs of plastic that currently adorn three walls of the room. But I like them too much.

I like the packaging, the artwork, the booklets, the casing. Plastic, cardboard, foam and paper, individual little moments of design. Love ‘em. Lots of other folk have written gloriously exhaustive and eloquent notes on the subject so I won’t go into it all here, but do check out the sleevage blog if you’re interested in the topic. Or even in fact if you’re not, because sleevage is unquestionably ace.

Anyhow, I’ve never seen the appeal of buying MP3s when you sacrifice all of the additional creativity that’s gone into making the music into a package. There’s no artwork, no notes, and that’s a real shame.

More to the point, it’s the packaging that makes an impression and allows me to find the album when I want to play it.

I long ago gave up ordering my CDs alphabetically – you end up with your Beastie Boys stuck up in the top corner and your Frank Zappa back-crunchingly close to the floor – instead choosing to just slap them in the shelves and allow the ones I’ve listened to most recently to slowly gravitate to the spots closest to the computer and the stereo. There are a few areas where I tend to stick compilations rather than artist albums, and the skinny little singles cases tend to huddle together for warmth, but the only subdividing I’ve consciously done is to group my albums by packaging.

Those in plastic jewel cases are in one rack, those in thin cardboard sleeves are in another and those in more ‘boxy’ cardboard packaging are in another. And this works fine for me.

And yes, I know that if they were MP3s on my hard drive I could just let the computer search for them, but often I can’t remember the name of a song, or the artist, just that it’s probably on that blue compilation CD in the cardboard sleeve that got free with the big issue a few years back, now what the hell was that called? Or that promo disc with the cow on the front, pastic box, red spine I think, maybe black letters, gawd knows what it was called… ah yes, spotted it, lovely.

all of which is to say… that I’m blatantly looking for something to distract me from having a huge clearout of my CD collection. So I’ll stop there and get back to it.