Is your music collection too large..

There are people I know with a lot more than the above - which might seem a silly amount to some people but it works for me. I'm all for quality over quantity, but I'm just a sucker for too many genres and sub-genres and sub-sub-genres and so on.

More an intensely personal biography in music than a collection though..

No you're not.

Seriously, how many of those songs do you think that guy's never listened to more than once? Or even at all?

damn itunes for having such a good selection. i'll probably spend $100 there by the end of the week.

At least half. Another person who backs up the premise that no one who steals shitloads of music has good (or any) taste. Gluttonous accumulation for its own sake. Which is sort of surprising considering that he's in a pretty good band.

I opened a bag of worms here. The above is the result of a long term unhealthy obsession with music. Gluttonous is perhaps appropriate. Indefensable as well, as it's extreme (though not, as I mentioned, nearly as extreme as some) and not 'right thinking' in many ways. There's no way I could listen to more than a fraction over the space of each year, but it's more analogous to revisiting memories - it's important that they're there even if you don't go back to them very often.

Just on a side note - very little, percentage-wise at least, is unpaid for one way or another. That's actually sadder in many ways (think what else I could have done!) than if I was playing it more fast and loose with such things...

I have bought a few CDs twice not remembering that I already had them. At least I can give them out as gifts.