Forgotten Gems

I have a fair sized music library. According to iTunes it's currently 7,771 tracks, spanning 678 albums and 302 artists. And while that collection has been built over the past 16 or 17 years, almost half of that is stuff I've purchased in the past 5 years. My music library started growing faster when the iTunes Music Store (since renamed to simply the iTunes Store, since they now have video and apps as well) opened in Canada since it was in most cases a lot cheaper than buying the physical CD (which would have just ended up in a box in my closet anyway after loading it into iTunes), and it really took off once I discovered the web sites eMusic and Amie Street. But what of the music from the previous dozen years?

Sadly, much of it has gone unnoticed lately. Not that I don't like those albums anymore (although shifting musical tastes does account for deliberately skipping some), but I've just been obtaining so much music that I find myself mostly listening to my more recent purchases. And the fact that I really love so many of these albums so much doesn't help. There's one album in particular which I purchased near the end of April, that I've already listened to over 30 times. Others, I've listened to at least once a week since I got them. Many of my current favourite bands are groups I never heard of before the previous couple years.

Since my iPhone doesn't have anywhere near enough space to contain my whole music library, about a year and a half ago I set up a combination of iTunes Smart Playlists and Applescript code to automatically find a random selection of albums I hadn't listened to in a while and transfer just those to my iPhone whenever I plug it in. This has allowed me to kill two birds with one stone—help me to remember to listen to albums I haven't heard in a while, and allow me to leave my iPod at home when I go out for a walk so I don't have to carry around two devices capable of playing music. It's always fun to look at what albums had been loaded onto my iPhone and see some great ones I haven't listened to in ages.

This weekend I listened to a particular album selected by my Random Albums setup, that really made me think. If you asked me a dozen years ago which were my favourite music groups they would have definitely been in the top three. But unlike the other two of the top three, which still are around today, these guys disbanded a decade ago. Since they haven't released any albums in ages they eventually dropped off my radar. Counting this weekend, it appears that I've only listened to them twice in the past few years. But that doesn't mean I don't like their music any more. Far from it. In fact, as I was driving down the highway with this album playing, I was still singing along to almost every song, just as if it hadn't been several years since I last heard it.

It got me thinking, I wonder how many other similar “forgotten gems” are collecting virtual dust in my music library? So, I decided that for the next week or so I cannot allow myself to listen to anything that's been added to my music library in the past few years. I think it'll be an interesting week, filled with many “Wow, how could I forgotten how great this album is?” moments.