Originally Posted by Unicr0n

I do something similar to Mrd00d, in that three or four of my friends have copies (or large portions, in some cases, in that most people don't have a terabyte and a half of free space just for music) of my collection, and this serves a dual purpose. First, in the event of a hard drive failure I can reacquire my collection with minimal effort. And second, it introduces my friends to new music that they never would have found otherwise.

I've never felt 'burdened' by my collection -- I'm sitting on about 215,000 tracks, and most of the time I just run my entire library on shuffle (I've never been a huge 'album' listener, I kind of prefer the chaos of never knowing what's coming up next), and I'm quite content with that. I've been building this collection, with a few breaks due to lack of internet, for about ten years now, and I'm quite proud of it.

I also feel this need to sort of, I don't know, preserve music. I mean sure, all the famous, well known music is gonna be around forever, but what about all the lesser-known stuff, the stuff that barely anyone ever hears? Even if it isn't fantastic, it deserves to be preserved for future generations, at least in my opinion. So I acquire anything and everything that I can. I know I'll never listen to all of it, it's a literal impossibility when you look at my download vs. listening rate. But just to know that it's preserved, and that my friends, being how they are, pass around a lot of this lesser known music, and that it slowly sort of radiates out from my position to other places makes me feel like I'm doing something to maintain a medium that I care deeply about.

I literally lay awake at night thinking about all the stuff that is probably slipping through the cracks as I'm laying there -- small print runs that I'll never get my hands on, that will get lost in the folds of time. It makes me quite sad, actually.

Originally Posted by RVCA

What kind of stuff?

Originally Posted by Janszoon

Media technology.

Originally Posted by lucifer_sam

I think he was suggesting the digital age will stay around for a long time to come, even if the media we equip it on changes over time.

Originally Posted by Janszoon

I understand, but what I was suggesting is that the direction it will take is impossible to predict. Who's to say ten years from now the software to play our audio files will simply be no longer available.

Originally Posted by Batty

When first starting out dowloading most people just d/l anything and everything because they can, then they get bored and slow down and start to get picky about what they download, this is what I see happening with most posters on this thread, myself included.