Guilty as charged.
One reason is that I've long been a bit of a cheapskate who likes to get bargains. That is, I like to pay well "below market" prices, so I can get my money back if I resell.
That means that a lot of my vinyl purchases are bulk-buys of whole collections.
That, in turn, means I end up with a bunch of duplicates, and a bunch of LPs I don't REALLY want.
I don't like to get rid of vinyl without at least listening to it once, so the rate at which those dupes and question marks and probably-don't-want-its leave is slower than the rate at which they can come in.
I DID do a massive sort-through once, simplifying my cataloging system and putting most of my records in a simple alphabetical order. In doing this, I combined both already-cleaned and not-yet-cleaned LPs. Then I went through and culled out a bunch of duplicates. I've still got two boxes of those in the living room, as I am going through them and cleaning and re-sleeving the ones that need it, before resale. I'll be selling off one box of them (a bulk sale to a dealer) within a week. Every bit helps.
But in the meantime, I have about six boxes of LPs in the living room that have come in within the past couple of months (since the big sort mentioned above) that still need to be "sorted in", and the dupes, etc... weeded out...
I hardly ever seem to "catch up".
I can see how to catch up, and it is simple:
1. If I were willing to get rid of records without making myself listen to them first, I could more quickly reduce the bulk to what would fit on my shelves. I'm just not sure if I'm ready to do that, though. There is always that feeling that one of those unheard records will turn out to be a "gem" that I'll want to keep. Since I already own them, at least finding out before letting them go seems to make sense.
2. I have a bunch of records that I own because they came in bulk buys. I don't mind them, I may listen to them occasionally, but they are not records that I LOVE. They are not favorites. They are not ones that I would choose to buy, if they were at full price. They just aren't bad, and are in great shape, and I tend to hang on to them because "once in a while" I may want to listen to them. If I were pickier and kept only those records that I REALLY like and will listen to with regularity, I could probably cut the bulk at least in half.
3. I have some records that I often THINK I will want to listen to, or that I "intend" to listen to "one day", but I never seem to actually be in the mood to hear them. An example: my latest bulk-buy batch of records included some Englebert Humperdink LPs in great cosmetic shape. I went to stick them in the appropriate alphabetical location, thinking one day I'll listen to them, and realized that I now have 7 or 8 different EH records. I NEVER particularly liked this guy, growing up.
To me, he's some oily crooner only appropriate for old ladies in Las Vegas. I'm unlikely to ever like him enough to want to sit and play all those LPs for pleasure. If I really don't want to have him on my playlist, I thought, then why am I giving him 7-8 record's worth of my valuable shelf space? But I didn't want to discard (sell) them, because I thought, "What if I actually LIKE some of what is on these things?"
So I compromised: I pulled them all out, and will listen to at least several of them this week. I'll make a decision: do I EVER need/want to have EH music available? IF I really do, I'll listen to them all and decide what to keep. More likely, I'll listen to a few, and then take the whole stack and sell them. This is one of those singers I would never have chosen to buy at retail, so why should I have his stuff on my shelves, just because the albums "came my way" in boxes that I got because of other records in them (and not these)?
Similarly, I have a few Liberace records, too, and some Billy Joels and Barry Manilows and all those other once-ubiquitous and now-unwanted types that inevitably creep into any large box-buy of records. I managed to eliminate a few boxes of duplicates of these before, but the next step is to go through everything again and decide which to entirely ELIMINATE from the shelves. I don't need to keep one/the best copy of each and every disc that comes my way. I only want to keep the ones I really LIKE, and that is the next step.
The only challenge is finding time to do this second-pass purge, and to do it quickly enough that the new stuff doesn't come in faster than I can clear the old stuff out. A moratorium on buying would help, but since buying opportunities are irregular and uncontrollable, it may backfire. I could let go of a few opportunities to "buy time", only to then be ready to buy at the beginning of a prolonged "drought". It requires confidence that there will always be more supply; a difficult thing to have when the supply seems to be steadily dwindling and prices steadily climbing.
Oh, one other thing I actually haven't completely finished: I still have some multiple-copy situations where I need to sit down and do a comparison-listening to decide which copy (or copies) to keep. If I'm not in the mood to want to listen to the tune, I'm usually not in the mood to listen to it several times over... so some of the ones I don't want to hear so badly remain undone. Perhaps I should take that as a sign and just chuck them all?
One thing I will continue to do, though: remain pickier than I used to be about what comes in. As the quality of my collection has moved upward, I've become VERY picky about condition. I don't want any LPs with ANY visible scratches, even light superficial ones that will be "played through" or with poor covers, etc... unless they are super-rare and very desirable. I have to really WANT a record AND feel it is a good example of that title, before I will buy it. I'll still do bulk-buys, but even with those I'm pickier; there have to be enough records that I really want, in good condition, or I'll walk away from them. Lately I'm far more likely to walk away than I am to buy, unless there is something really, really nice in the batch. That helps.
uke: back on the shelf yesterday. It was in too good a shape to discard.
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