Society’s consumption and listening of music has changed a lot in the past eight years – the same eight years that I have been into music. In high school I bought CDs and listened to them in my car or Walkman. During this time Apple released its now-dominant iTunes and iPod. iTunes was the first well-designed and very usable digital content managing program for many of us. Forget iPods for a second – iTunes let the masses easily burn all their CDs and store a massive library of music in practically no space at all.

When I went to college I burned all my CDs to my laptop. Because of its easy to useness and legitimateness, iTunes was partially responsible for me letting go of the need to physically buy and maintain a music library. I’d still rather buy DVDs and books, but I have not bought a CD in two years and that is a big deal for someone who had as many albums as I did in high school. I have since sold most of those CDs because I just don’t need them anymore.

Everything fit on my hard-drive in the fall of 2005. But thanks to dorm file-sharing applications and my position at the college radio station, I had more access to free music than ever before. I kept getting so much new music that a year later I had to buy an external hard-drive to house all of that music. Later, after buying a new laptop with more internal space, I was able to move it back to my internal hard-drive to make listening to music more fun. But I still had to cull back my collection, pruning 10 or so gigs of forgettable crap.

Over the course of a few years, I’ve been slowly deleting records to make space for new ones or just to satisfy my desire to get rid of records I did not like. Or, more importantly, to eliminate the problem that years of liking post-rock and drone/ambient/experimental instrumental electronic music effectively ruins any fun in letting music shuffle or play from the master collection.

Before starting this, I had 35 and 1/2 days, or almost 57 gigabytes of music. That’s almost 13,000 songs. I know people who have more, for sure, but I think I need to do a serious purging of my iTunes. Weed the bad albums and bands that I never listen to. I’m writing about it because I think it will be a fun way to look back on the evolution of my musical tastes as well as figure out why I like what I like and why I don’t like what I like.

There will be several Rounds of elimination, starting with albums I’ve never listened to, then going to artists and albums where I really like one song but never listen to the rest, and so on and so on… And here we go!

Round 1: Eliminating Outliers

Here are some of the albums on iTunes that I have never, ever listened to. I would have a long time ago, but there is a peril to eliminating records I have never listened to in that one day I might listen to them and discover at least one good song. So I’ve listened to all (or most) of these records to give them at least a fair shot toward being a KEEPAH or getting the AX. (more…)