When I got my first laptop back in 2007, I dumped a lot of music on it from my friend Jean's iPod while he was giving me some M.I.A. I then added a shit-ton of my ex's music on, and went about downloading new music, getting recommendations from friends and raiding hard-drives, on and on, and ended up in this really horrible place where my iTunes was overrun with music I hadn't listened to but I 'should', you know? Like, all of Jean's Yeah Yeah Yeahs & his extensive collection of Bjork... Stuff I figured I should keep around to expand my musical horizons, become more well-rounded, since I live in eternal fear of becoming a snobby elitist and all. I was also becoming one of those tools that had one song by one artist.. times a million.

I think with the advents of iPods, music players with such gigantic capacities, people began collecting music as proof of how hardxcore their mp3 player is, like a weird 'my disk capacity is bigger than your disk capacity' brag-fest. My darling little brother is super proud of his 20 something gigs of music, and since I know he listens to practically all of it, I ain't judging, but if people are anything like me, their '0 plays' songs on iTunes take a hell-lot of scrolling to get past. & it's all songs that you're never going to listen to and appreciate, you know?

So yeah, I sat around dreaming of a blank iTunes, to which I would slowly add songs I truly loved listening to. & I got my dream when Shaun redid my old Compaq and it ran super-fast. I had to take all my music off and I got a little crazy pruning things (aforementioned bro got a little concerned with how many artists ended up in the Recycle Bin and was sweetly reassuring me that he had everything I had deleted in case I ended up regretting it) and it was so sweet to plonk only the songs I loved back on.

The music system I have now has evolved slowly over my years of owning a laptop, and works really well for me. I download and gather a lot of music from different music blogs, communities, Shaun's hard-drive (heh) so it's firstly organized by month. Before I play a downloaded tune I make sure it's in a folder, and add songs to my iTunes through the folder. New iTunes is also fantabulous because it's eliminated that stupid stupid nauseatingly frustratingly annoying tendency to add the same song twice to one library. And after a song/album's been added, it gets thoroughly aurally assessed, because my default iTunes playlist is 'Recently Added'. Songs that never end up growing on me are deleted, and the songs I do end up liking for real-real I never forget, because I've almost-certainly listened to them more than once.

I've also taken to going through roughly once a month and flicking my display setting to show the songs with the least play counts, and giving them a listen. They're usually sentimental songs, but there are some that slipped past me the first time and boom! Deletion.

It's wicked, I have to say that my music collection, just thinking about it makes me all warm and contented. It's so pruned and perfected and fiddled over.