MP3 & iTunes are Gateway Drugs to OCD

I'm trying to go through and delete some music on my iTunes since I'm at 18,000 songs and running out of hard drive space. The MP3 format has allowed users to have as many songs as they can fit, and thanks to the Internet, most people can acquire them for free. This is a gift and a curse.

Clearly for me, I've become a victim of the curse. 18,000 songs is too many. That's a total of 55 days of music. Two months. Why? Why not? It's not like the songs are taking up "space." It's all virtual. It's just become too easy to acquire new music and too hard to part with it. My old tactic was to get as much music as possible. If I heard someone's single, regardless of if I knew the band, I would try to download the entire album. It's too easy not to.

During high school, my OCD was so extreme I would "rate" the songs. Literally. Every. Song. I still do it sort of so I can just listen to the top song playlist on shuffle, but not for every song. Not 55 days worth. I'm still a little OCD though - I hate sloppiness in iTunes. Some of my friends have it so unorganized and it always drives me nuts (I.E. Blink 182, Blink-182, and Blink182 - the exact same band/songs, but organized by different spellings.)

I'm trying to go through my library and delete music I've never listened to. It's hard to part with things that aren't taking up space and didn't cost money. I really don't know anything about the band "The Friday Night Boys," and I won't commit any time to them, yet I CAN'T GET RID OF THEM. I probably have at least 10-15 other bands I can say the same thing for. And another 10-15 bands where I really like this one song, but couldn't tell you anything about the rest of the album. Or I have songs I LOVED from high school, and they're not really songs I listen to anymore. The solution sounds simple: get rid of the songs you don't know or don't listen to. It just isn't so simple. It never is. It doesn't take up that much space, can't I just keep it?

So part of my 2010 rules (I don't like the word resolution, even though they are derivatives) is to stop wasting space. It was really hard to hit the delete button, but I was finally able to say goodbye to bands I never really knew. And I never would. It was hard, but I persevered. I like to think of this post as the first step of rehab in a long, continuing conquest against iTunes OCD.