Music Minutes by Year 2

It's been a couple of years since I last charted the number of minutes I had of music from each year. I've bought a number of albums in the past couple of years, including several jazz albums, which was previously not something in my collection. I like jazz, though I prefer to listen to it live; still, with my parents traveling with me for a bit and with their absolute hatred of contemporary music, I had to find something we could both be satisfied with. No show tunes or big band for me, no alternative rock for my parents, so jazz it was. Let's see how the years fared:

Looks like the 1990s are still where most of my music collection resides, with a fairly heavy drop-off in the 2010s. There's been a small uptick in the 1980s collection, probably because I've been replacing tapes with CDs where possible. I could suspect several reasons for the current drop-off in CDs: digital online music means that used CDs for contemporary music are more rare (I buy most of my music from used CD bins); I'm less familiar with contemporary music (indeed, I listen to college radio less than I used to, as it has been overrun by stupid talk shows; I go out to see bands less frequently than I used to; and I pay less attention to music blogs than I used to); and there are fewer music stores at which to buy music (again, I still tend to buy CDs rather than downloading, which means that a number of artists' new works are still on the to purchase list, since the dearth of local record stores means I can only check one or two venues to see if an album is in stock rather than five or six as I used to be able to).

Percentage of Bands I've Seen Live in My CD Collection

What percentage of bands contained in my CD collection have I seen live? Here's how it breaks down:

Music Minutes by Year

I wrote a bit of poetry when I was in high school, but my poetry has never been a form that was highly connected to music. It has a kind of intellectual quality to it, the most recent published sample of which is available here at Negative Suck.

Of course, I didn't buy a lot of music before I graduated from high school, a combination of lack of money and parental restrictions (no rock music). Beyond that, my CD collection didn't start until 1992, a few years before I would purchase a CD player--I stuck with tapes until CD players got to be under fifty dollars. So this affects the years for which I have CDs. Also affecting the years from which I have CDs is that fact that I was a radio deejay in the mid-1990s, which means I was most familiar with music during this time, and I believe that is born out in the amount of minutes of CD listening time assigned per year in the following bar chart I'm about to render. Let's see:

My Music Collection

I don't know if this has any significance whatsoever, but here's an alphabetical breakdown of my CDs by band name or last name of artist.

And here's the same pie but this time by the number of albums per artist alphabetically.

They pretty much match.