I bought so many I needed a wheelbarrow!

Eleven? Lightweight. ;-)

At least sixty has to be my all-time high, but that's gotta be an underestimation based on some of my binges. I doubt I've cracked seventy-five. (Please note -- this is in part based on good things like massive clearance sales at cool record stores like Aron's in Hollywood, where a fine slew of discs can be had for a buck a piece or so at times.) And yes, they were for myself -- though I can turn them into work thanks to the AMG. ;-)

Actually, I was thinking of you when I wrote this question, Ned, because I remembered your claim on one of the other threads. Now that I think about it, I know I've bought somewhere between 30 and 40 used pieces of vinyl at one point, and I know for a fact that I've bought more than 11 CDs at once when some of them were used. I guess I was thinking "new" when I phrased the question, but hell, answer any way you like. It may give better insight if you mention whether they were new or from the clearance bin, or 10 cent used items from a garage sale.

I have bought a lot (for me) of CDs in the last couple of weeks but some of them were found online so it will take a while to deliver... I remember feeling very guilty at having spent about £50 on five albums I *had* to have last week... that's quite a lot for me... All in all, in the last three weeks i have ordered/purchased about 16 albums and a Two Lone Swordsmen T-shirt which absolutely breaks the record for me. I'm going to be so broke by the end of term, it'll be unbelievable.

Mmm, somewhere above 20 maybe? I try not to think about it. :)

85 at one time, due in part to a massive insurance cheque. I ordered them all online. I would never do that again, since It took me months to even listen to them all, much less enjoy them. Since then, I've sold several of that batch. Now I top out at 3 a week, it keeps me happy.

A friend and I did need a wheelbarrow (or in actual fact a van) for a set of a about 1400 library music albums (spanning the era c1968-1985) which we bought from a market trader for 100 pounds.

Mayhaps a dozen or so from one shop in a single day, probably one that I worked at. Years ago there would be day-long excursions that resulted in a sack of booty, though hardly on Ned('s Atomic) Raggett- like levels. Going home with promos were another thing; I would frequently clean out the play rack and take a hundred home for trading fodder. I really miss those days, but I continue to slowly sink under the weight of boxes populated by orphaned Atlantic cutouts. Screamin' Cheetah Wheelies, anyone?

I really am fucking sick of what should be a forum for expressing passion and wonderment at music/culture degenerating into the pathetic old male game of "I've got more CDs than you," "I bought 290 CDs at once," "I have at least 2,000,000 CDs, not counting the vinyl, in my bathroom, but I lost count." For fuck's sake! There were RIOTS going on today (I know . . . I was in one)! WAKE UP! If ILM is simply going to be glorified philately then I might as well look at the Stanley Gibbons website instead for all the good it will do.

These numbers astound me. I'm sure I've never bought more than 7 or 8 at one time. Wow. Don't you want to save anything for the next visit?

there were not any riots here, it was mostly lovely.

On saving anything -- fuck no. It might be gone next time through, after all. ;-)

Regarding Marcello and all that -- ahem. Last I checked not being in a riot, say, didn't automatically mean thinking things weren't fucked. I refer you to the Dead Kennedys' song "Riot" and offer you sincere apologies for not being as right on as you, o People's Poet.

that guy who's never contributed at all before has a point...'number of albums' threads are boring. i dunno about that riot stuff though.

It's not about quantity,it's about quality. Then again once I came back from London. My dad had problems carrying my bad cause it was stuffed with records (and books, anotherobsession).

Because I only used to get paid once a month, I would tend to binge- buy albums. On payday, I'd go out and buy 8-12 albums, and then not buy anything else for the rest of the month. Woe to any good releases which happened to fall in the middle of the month, then... I've missed buying quite a few albums that way (the last was the GSYBE! double thing... however, having heard the Whole Thing now, I'm not sure that was such a loss.)

The most I've ever bought in one go... gah, depends on travel. If I'm going somewhere the exchange rate is good, I'll binge on literally dozens of them. Paul and I went to NYC back in January, and we only stopped buying when our suitcases became too impossibly heavy to carry.

However, this kind of sucks, as there are some CDs I bought on that binge that I still haven't got around to listening to. Shame.

I prefer listening to them than buying 'em, unless it's a car boot and you find a crate of records that used to belong to an a muso.

Marcello, I think everyone here recognises the inherently sad nature of having a million cds. Ned of course is a terribly sad person. I'm surprised though that you question our revolutionary credentials; of course we don't have any. Culture is a bourgeoisie myth, doncha know....

Probably about 5 or 6.

It should be pointed out that the record-collection show-off threads are, what, 3 out of 500? THAT SAID there is no need for Ethan to come in and go, oh hey mr-person-who-doesn't-contribute, as the stats page is no more an indicator of the worth of contributions than the size of your record loft. (Also Marcello does contribute).

The most records I've ever bought at a time is 128, in conjunction with a friend.

I would argue that buying records in such absurd quantities - ours were all 10p each - might be said to go counter to rockist (sorry Patrick) listening experience in that you simply CAN'T take all the sound in, make sense of it etc. It forces you into a 'pop' mode of listening, not giving records their Mojo-ish "due consideration", instead picking over them for moments magpie-like. Put one on - thirty seconds - no it's shite - throw it on the discard pile.

That's why this kind of massive binge is more fun in theory than practice. No matter how much you want to hear the records, it feels like a chore to go through them after a while.

And of course I almost never buy an album if I don't expect it to be worthy of "due consideration" (I'm sure non-Mojo people don't usually go "hey, why don't I buy this one, I'm sure it's crap except for that one song"). Why bother otherwise ? Life's too short.

I buy at least 30 cds a month. But then I don't have a girlfriend so I've a lot of time on my hands.

I'm not *that* sad, I'm just pathetic. Ref -- Smashing Pumpkins thread. ;-)

Patrick - records in question were almost all 10p or 20p each. At that price you buy records with *no* good songs on, just the odd interesting title or tasty cover, and then trying to listen to them all at once is a fantastic derangement of how you might normally approach newly bought music.

I've just thought of something, which is that one reason ILM works well is that its structure mirrors the way people listen to pop. A new thread/album appears and is obsessed over for a week or two and then gets filed away, and the better ones come out every couple of months for another look.

Sounds reasonable, Tom. I think ILM has to reflect both the ecstasy and the despair as well as the weird mix of transience and permanence which the art of listening to pop can engender in the alert listener. I also maintain that if it is going to remain readable we need to avoid turning into a glorified "Record Collector" forum. I would much rather spend some time with someone who had just one CD but loved it and knew it inside out than someone with 300,000 CDs unlistened to for the sake of "being up-to-date" or "comprehensive." I also think that we need to maintain some sort of relationship with the world as it (un)develops. Granted, May Day was a bit of a damp squib, and I've seen more ruckus at the Manor ground (RIP) at 5:10 on a Saturday afternoon (though probably not so much now as a division has now come between us and Millwall) - but why aren't we talking about, say, the seeming inability of any current music to reflect or even inspire what's going on right now, rather than how many Nissan Micras we needed to convey our 10p record boxes out of Beanos? As regards "not contributing" - well I've been doing so in various fora since about 1979. If we start treating this forum as a closed shop, inadmissible to anyone without the right password or sufficient numbers of CDs in their collection, then no one will bother reading it - and we're talking about the third (and most important) party here, the readership (if there is any).

Marcello thinks we should talk about the "seeming inability of any current music to reflect or even inspire what's going on right now"

OK, no one's stopping you. Why don't you start a thread and try to convince me? (It sounds pretty tendentious.)

Your comments are well-taken, Marcello, but I think maybe a bit exaggerated. I'm not really in favour of turning ILM into a record collector forum, either, because I find many of these people extremely tedious to be around. I think if you go searching through the other threads on the forum (and I know you have because I've seen your name there) that you'll realize that most of us, even those who have gotten the proverbial wheelbarrow for one of our shopping sprees, feel deeply about music and engage with certain albums and artists pretty deeply.

I still think this thread is valid, however. When I posted it, it was partly an attempt to flush out people who might want to have a pissing contest with Ned, but I think it also reveals a lot about our psyches as music lovers sometimes: we love music so much that some of us buy more than we can reasonably digest in one shot, and some ends up neglected. (I do this more with books, really.) Part of it was also to hear from people like Kate, who would save up for weeks and then go crazy at the store. Sometimes I think the way we buy music is almost as important as the way we listen to it: do you enjoy it more when you buy it in dribbles and drabbles, or do you get satisfaction on getting a stack you've been saving up for, and then spending the entire weekend immersed in music? Both can be fun, and I find it illuminating.

Er, for clarification, I find hardcore record collectors to be tedious to be around, not the people on ILM.

For my part, I find this idea that the subject of one or two random threads out of hundreds suddenly is a sign of the forum's collapse or exclusivity to be so hyperbolic as to be unbelievable...