On 23/04/2012, Tom Fine wrote:

> Thirded. 46 years old and my music collection (about 70% CD, 29%
> grooved disks, 1% tapes) splits:
> 
> 40% jazz, everything from very early-era 78's through acid-jazz with a
> very few examples of fusion and no "free jazz".
> 15% blues, soul, R&B, funk and what could be called ethnographic and
> "world music" (mainly Afro-funk).
> 20% rock, from "Rocket 88" to punk, thrash and heavy metal, a very few
> rock-rap crossover titles and a very few 80s syntho-rock stuff, also
> includes folk 25% classical, with an emphasis on orchestral music and
> very little vocal music
> 
> I also have quite a few spoken-word recordings and OTR recordings, but
> nothing approaching a real collection like what some of you have.
> 
> My friend and I were talking about how we keep discovering things with
> Record Store Day reissues because we grew up pre-InterWebs and there
> were only so many sources of information about music in the suburbs
> where I grew up and in farm country where he grew up. Radio was less
> cookie-cutter back then, but college radio was still the only place
> with real out-of-mainstream playlists. Record stores were past their
> heyday and were clogged with LP and cassette versions of the latest
> Hot 100 hits and a little bit of back-catalog from the majors
> (definite exceptions if one travelled into NYC in those days). And
> MTV, from the beginning, was all about promoting pop hits, not about
> variety. Kids today do not understand what the pre-Napster world was.
> I say pre-Napster because the whole idea of readily-available digital
> music really took off (illegally) with Napster, and now the genie is
> out of the bottle. So a kid curious about just about anything will
> likely find a full-length version of it on YouTube or at least plenty
> of half-minute excerpts on Amazon or iTunes. Unless it's relatively
> obscure, he may find it and many related tunes using Pandora, although
> at best I'd compare Pandora to what used to be called "progressive
> radio" when I was a kid -- it's not really that far out of the
> mainstream but it's far enough to encompass some interesting stuff.
> 
It's very different here, where we have BBC Radio 3, with programs like
"Late Junction" (interesting music of every kind), "Here and Now"
(current "classical" music), lots of jazz, and acres of classical
including an all-night program which plays complete works including much
obscure stuff.

You are always hearing something new. 

The Radio 2 channels covers not only rock but 1930s-to-50s popular
music.


My collection is around 70% CDs, 29% vinyl and 1% shellac. 

I guess it is around 70% "classical" (from medieval up to Boulez, Carter
and a few younger living composers), 20% jazz and 10% all the rest.

Regards
-- 
Don Cox
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