.....there's a surprise

....my itunes library tells me that it has 17 and a half days of music stored in it
thats 420 hours
25,2000 minutes
5,668 tunes
this is great.... isn't it?
that's how much music i've collected since i got my macbook 3 years ago. that's nearly 2000 tunes a year, that's about 5 and a half new tunes a day!
now... i have to say i do listen to stacks of music every day but i do listen to a lot of stuff over and over again.... so do i need all of this music.... well... i think yes, because like everything else some of them are to keep forever, some are transient and passing, some need ditching, and some were interesting at the time. i'm not convinced though that i know them all as well as i used to know my music. as a teenager i remember buying an album and pouring over the cover and each track and the liner notes and the lyrics... we listen to music differently now and broader than this we consume differently. we scan the surface and seldom go deeper. we are in danger of becoming a generation that know very little about a lot and a ridiculous amount of the niche we decide to delve deeper into. i think i know a lot about music.... and to be fair i do... but have a conversation with someone about the music they like and within a short space of time you discover that despite a mutual love of music their is nothing to talk about and discuss because we know nothing about each others music.... the diversity of music is a wonderful thing and people now more than ever seem to listen to a broad range of music.... there seems to be a lack of the tribal banality that was evident in the whole mods/rockers/punk thing. techno kids are at home at a metal gig and vice versa and there are bands doing amalgams of all styles!

.....the music ocean is vast ...as is film ...as is tv .....as is literature ....where does it end ....when i was at school we all had the same cultural references because we waited every week for the radio one chart , and watched the same tv programs on our 3 channels, and watched the same films ....i'm not saying this is a bad thing ....i just wonder at what point the niche market becomes so niche that it can't sustain itself... or has something else happened ...has niche become mainstream ....i think so ....don't kid yourself that you're alternative because there are so many people into alternative that it's as popular as the latest blockbuster movie, or this weeks number 1 selling single......

...and all of this sparked off by itunes picking zooropa by u2 and me thinking "my itunes never picks u2 ....and isn't this a great tune ....and when u2 released this i so wasn't ready for it and wanted them to be just like they used to be......"