The Ghost of Decembers Past

Or parenthood's effect on my music Listenership . . . .

It occurred to me yesterday that it is December. (I know. I am quick that way.) In Decembers of my childless past, I usually made a list of my top ten albums of the year. This made me laugh, as I don't even know if I bought ten new albums this year. This is not an exaggeration, because. . . well, have you ever taken a toddler into Criminal Records? There are display shelves to be knocked over with stroller wheels, magazines to be torn off the shelves, comics to be marred with grimy fingers, and listening stations at which to throw tantrums when Mama won't let you listen to the new Minus the Bear any longer.

I am also now one half of a partnered CD collection ownership. This means that after an initial high of suddenly doubling one's CD collection and relegating doubles of any CDs to the Lakehouse, there comes a realization that one can no longer blow a whole paycheck on CDs in one week, at least not without the nod from one's better half.

At this point in my life, I can barely get out of the house to the grocery store and the gym, much less the record store on Tuesdays. My dear husband, who, thankfully, has excellent taste in music, or else I never would have married him, now buys the CDs for the family. This, for a former rabid CD buyer, is akin to the feminist wife conceding that her husband pays all the bills. (Oh yeah, Todd does that too.) It is, well, embarrassing.

Live shows? What a laugh. There was a time when I went to see a band play, on a weeknight, no less, just because I had heard that they were pretty good. These days? I am lucky if it is my turn to go see our favorite bands (Todd and I often switch off the rights to see bands we both like), or if it is something that we both must see, well, we have to make plans for sitters months in advance. I find that I now really only see music from last decade, or worse yet, that we are now the people who see reunion tours. Pixies, anyone?

I no longer spend hours on end in my car during five o'clock traffic, and any music that I do listen to is played on my computer with a backdrop of Thomas the Tank Engine or Dora the Explorer. There is no more buying of a highly-anticipated CD, coming home, putting it on the stereo, and laying on the couch perusing the liner notes as I listen to every lyric, from start to finish, on the album. There is no longer that intimate knowledge of every CD I purchase.

So, I started thinking about what my favorite albums were in 2005, and CRAP, I couldn't even remember what came out this year. I decided to make an MP3 album in Itunes of just stuff that we bought in 2005. (This was made more difficult by Todd's inability to import CDs into ITunes and confirm that the year is included in the info for every CD.) I would theoretically listen to this album over and over, become insanely knowledgeable about each and every song on every album that we (Todd) purchased in 2005, and then come up with my phenomenal list.

I have not had that much time to listen to it, and when I do, I tend to listen to a few particular albums over and over, rather than listening to each album in succession until I've listened to them all, and then starting over at the first album on the disc. But I still have 16 days left!

In the course of creating said 2005 disc, I started messing around with ITunes. (If one did have hours of time on their hands, they could definitely use them all playing with ITunes.) I became curious: How many hours of music did we buy in 2005? Was that more or less than 2003, the year that Rollie was born? I spent the first 8 months of 2003 childless, and therefore with time to buy and listen to music. How did 2003 compare with 1999, the year I met Todd? When I met Todd in 1999, was I listening to more or less music than I did in 1995, the year I graduated from college? God knows I had plenty of time to listen to music back then. And how did 1995 compare to 1992, the heyday of my music buying? Technically, I bought a ton of music prior to '92, but since SOME FUCKERS STOLE EVERY CD I OWNED FROM MY APARTMENT in the fall of '92, this would not be truly representative of the amount of music I owned at the time. Alas, there is no real way to know those last numbers, as the discs are long gone, and never saw ITunes import.

Anyway, here are the stats (remember, they are not completely accurate, due to CD theft of 1992, and the fact that this includes both mine and Todd's CD collections):

Year: 1992 (Sophomore year of college. The year that everything bought before the Fall was stolen. This number, if accurate, would be much, much higher.)
739 Songs, 1.8 days

Year: 1995
643 Songs, 1.7 days

Year: 1999
600 songs, 1.5 days

Year: 2003
533 songs, 1.3 days

Year: 2005
187 songs, 12.9 hrs

As you can see, purchases have gradually declined since college, with a dramatic downturn since the birth of Rollie. Really, though, it seems to me that more than the decline in album purchases is the decline in the time I spend truly enjoying the music. What a sad, sad state of affairs. . . .