I use the CDPedia software to keep track of my music Archive. It offers a Statistics page that gives an interesting ‘from orbit’ view of the music collection it contains.
Please note that I use the phrase music archive with a specific meaning. My music library is stored in Plex, my music player software. When I want to play music, it’s my music library that I peruse. It usually has one copy of each title. My music archive, on the other hand, contains all of my music in storage. There may be multiple copies of each album.
So let’s go. Here are the top seven categories on the most interesting statistics:
The Artist field is no big surprise. Rush is my favourite band, and Yes is up there as well. Most artists here have a huge number of releases so they would gravitate upward in the listing. Various Artists is not an artist, of course, but rather a collection of songs by many artists. The pop music film soundtracks predominate here.
And as I was saying above, there are multiple copies of most albums by these bands. Yes has no where near 73 albums, but there’s the CD, the high-res digital download, and the super-duper Blu-ray special edition, for example. Each is a separate entry in the music archive. For a more specific example, I have seven copies of Close to the Edge, by Yes. Something is different about each one in my archive, but only one appears in my music library. That one is typically the best quality version I have.
This one’s pretty straight-forward. Who knew I have so many jazz and classical titles‽ I sometimes joke that the classical selection is nothing but different versions of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. While that’s a massive overstatement, I do have about fifteen different recordings of the piece! The vocal genre is where the singer is the main draw. Michael Bublé would be Vocal, for example.
I almost left this one off completely but I find it so interesting that Columbia comes in first, even though Sony bought Columbia in 2008. Further, Many Columbia releases are now labeled as Sony releases with no mention of Columbia at all. Still, an awful lot of jazz and much classical were released on Columbia through the years and no small part of the archive titles were published before the Sony takeover.
On another note is how wonderful ECM Records releases are. They put out Jazz and classical releases exclusively. When you get an ECM Records title, you may or may not like thew music, but the recording is always top notch. I’ve bought ECM recordings where the material sounds only vaguely interesting, but the recording quality is going to be great so I’m willing to risk it. They’re also an absolute haven from the loudness wars. Highly recommended.
You may have expected only classical composers to be listed here. Who cares who wrote music in the other genres, right? No, I care and make sure the composer metadata is complete in each file I add to my archive (and therefore, library). I absolutely adore Bach, so his appearance is no surprise. The jazz composers are also no surprise because they’re responsible for the jazz standards and so many jazz musicians cover them.
Paul McCartney is the outlier and is only here, I think, because he was in the Beatles, Wings, and also prolific as a solo artist. The first Beatles album was released in 1963 and his most recent solo album was released earlier this year. No wonder he appears on the list.
So there you go, a brief look at the statistics of the 8507 titles currently in my music archive. Kudos to all of you who made it this far.