Here, then, is where the bulk of my listening in 2010 resided. I find myself in an odd position of championing albums that are already well vetted. Almost defeats the purpose of keeping a weblog.
Unless, of course, my opinion rubs against conventional wisdom, which it so far hasn’t.
This year, I’m doing something slightly different. Given my propensity for catalog, I’m going to split my lists between new releases and catalog discoveries. The year-end favorite list is a time-honored rockist tradition, but how do you quantify a year-end favorite list of past titles? You don’t — it’s subjective.
Probably a more interesting list would be to pit 2010 against catalog. I think 2010 would lose that fight.
I’m fairly sure the first five slots of this list — although shifted from earlier drafts — are solid. The remaining five are malleable. In fact, I’m not sure how LCD Soundsystem made it on there. (Well, merit, of course, but I think I gave more spins to The Shape of Jazz to Come and Zenyatta Mondatta.) Comments provided for only the newest entries from previous drafts …
I spent most of December listening to the titles on the last On the playlist round-up because I was summoned to Honolulu for a family emergency. In short, my dad passed away.
It’s a saga I detail over at VexVox, but I pretty much flew out to Hawaiʻi at a moment’s notice, bringing only my most recent purchases. I wasn’t really in the frame of mind to shop for music — not that it stopped me from heading to Book-Off at Shirokiya in Ala Moana — so growth of the backlog was somewhat mitigated.
In fact, only two of these titles are actual physical purchases.
I use Music Collector to track my music catalog, and according to the database, I purchased only 53 titles with a 2010 release date. That number may be inaccurate since titles may be counted twice if I both downloaded it and bought a CD. Still, 53 is less than the number of titles I purchased that were released in 2009 (61), 2008 (96) or 2007 (92).
Another inaccuracy with the database is the date of purchase, which I don’t actively track but can approximate by the numerical ID of the database (high numbers == more recent purchase). So as an experiment, I cross-referenced my purchases in Quicken with my music database and grouped those purchases by year. Then I further grouped the results by release date. (I like data entry. Sue me.)
The earliest year I have purchase data is 2007, when I started tracking my finances in Quicken. In 2007, I purchased and downloaded 196 titles, 65 of which were released that year. That means 131 titles were catalog. (But I own 92 titles released in 2007. Why the discrepancy? Because 27 of those titles were purchased in subsequent years.) In 2008, I bought 69 new releases out of 159, with 90 catalog titles. In 2009, 51 out of 112 titles were new releases, leaving 61 catalog titles. 2010 — 53 out of 115, with 62 catalog titles.
The numbers are clear — catalog makes up the bulk of my listening now.