I’ve been par­ing down my CD col­lec­tion in recent weeks and it’s giv­en me occa­sion to reflect on my behav­ior in rough­ly a decade or so of heavy music consumption.

What have I learned? Who was that guy? I remem­ber spend­ing many a night at Mon­do Kim’s or AKA or pret­ty much any record store, fiend­ing in the used bin for any­thing note­wor­thy. Now I’m reap­ing the whirlwind.

There are discs that I’ve owned for ages that remain unopened, yet they still have sen­ti­men­tal val­ue sim­ply because I can remem­ber buy­ing them and then car­ry­ing them from dorm to apart­ment to dorm to apart­ment to house. Yet I can’t part with them.

I’ve come to the decid­ed­ly rock­ist con­clu­sion that the endgame of this purge is to select those artists whose work has ongo­ing mean­ing in my life and hold them fast and shake the rest out. Anoth­er way of say­ing this is that I’m apply­ing the auteur the­o­ry in the most vul­gar man­ner pos­si­ble to reduce the num­ber of total CDs in my col­lec­tion, those that I won’t just rip and for­get for all eternity.

For those of us cling­ing to phys­i­cal media in a dig­i­tal media world, it’s a game of “desert island discs” renewed, with a twist. What CDs would you keep to avoid your favorite tunes van­ish­ing into the ether after your hard­drive crashed?