To sell or not to sell?

My goodness, that's an awful and uninventive title... I apologize for making you read such tripe.

But, screw it, there are more important things to talk about.

I heart music. I really do. I spend way too much money going to concerts; for example, I'm seeing Tool for the second time this tour with my lady friend next week and I dropped $150 for tickets to see them in the exact same place, supporting the exact same album in almost the exact same seats that I did last September. I subscribe to eMusic.com and actually have a monthly allotment in my budget for "music" (this became necessary one month after spending all of my "food" money on CDs).

I bought a 60-gig iPod the day it came out, which was, at the time, the MOST POWERFUL PORTABLE MUSIC PLAYER IN THE WORLD. And, even now, is pretty sweet. I also have an external hard-drive for the sole purpose of storing all of my ripped music files, because they won't actually all fit on my laptop.

To go along with all of this, I have an extensive CD collection, too. It's one I've been working on for over a decade... starting with buying my first CD player and CD (Newsboys, "Take Me to Your Leader" when I was 12.

I'm not entirely sure how many albums I own, but it's somewhere between 500-600. And that's after periodic culling of artists I don't listen to and re-selling them to my local Newbury Comics.

All told, these stacks of shiny discs in jewel cases has taken me years to amass and cost roughly the same as a halfway-decent car.

I baby that collection, too. The CDs are stored in those portable, zippered, faux-leather cases which are all alphabetized by artist, and then arranged chronologically. Heck, I even bought racks just to display the cases in my room, in case anyone wanted to be impressed by my eclectic taste while perusing my room.

I clean the discs before and after each use, ensure there are no scratches, make sure each is placed back into the space it came out of (right side up, as well). I hate loaning them out and I only do it to people who I know well and where they live. So I can kill them if they scratch one of them.

But now, I'm thinking of getting rid of my collection.

(Ouch. It pains me to think of such things.)

It all started with my brother, actually... he got me hooked on eMusic - but it wasn't hard to get suckered in. For $10 a month, the site will give you 40 downloads a month (actually, they just cut back new subscribers to 30, but it's still a good deal) and it has a ton of indie rock stuff that I like to listen to.

Also - and I hope no spies from eMusic are reading this - but all you need to download another user's purchased tracks are their login and password. Brian and I have traded this, and so we've doubled our monthly downloads to 80 apiece.

That's a ton of music... basically two albums a week. It's a lot to digest and, in fact, I've been downloading stuff and then forgetting to listen to it for months on end.

It's also put a damper on my weekly trips to Newbury Comics and the other record stores I used to frequent - why buy a CD when you could just download it for free? And, even when I had to buy it, most of the time iTunes or eMusic was a cheaper option. I really want to support my guys in the record shops and I do get a little thrill every time I crack open some fresh liner notes, but I don't make a ton of money, am trying to save up to pay of school loans and buy a place... every little bit helps.

Brian's in the same boat. He actually just sold his collection (almost as extensive as mine, ha) for $550 to Second Spin - enough to give him and his wife a nice, little first anniversary celebration and a terrific B&B in New Hampshire and buy some other new gadgets and such.

It got me thinking... albeit ruefully... about selling mine. I mean, c'mon, think of the things I could be buying with that money! And what would I really be losing? I don't own a CD player for my apartment (the closest thing I have to a system is my sister's desktop, which is hooked up to some of my speakers and a sub), can use my iPod in the car and haven't even really looked at any of the cases or pulled the CDs out of their sleeves in forever.

But selling my collection means letting go - giving away my anal obsession of alphabetizing and organizing, losing the ability to show off hundreds of jewel cases and breaking the delightful habit of browsing record store bins on the weekends or my lunch break.

Let's face it... the best-selling CD of last year was a blank one. Maybe, like the 8-track and the LP, the CD's heyday is in the past. Perhaps it's time to cut my losses and run.

Besides, if I do get an iPhone, I'd have a new obsession to replace the old one, right?

To be continued...