My vinyl (LP) collection never grew too large for two reasons:
1. While I was away at college, much of my record collection was stolen from my dorm room. Not just mine, but everyone who lived in the building. Obviously, this happened in gradual spurts, and I did not realize the extent of the stealing until a good chunk of my records were missing. Only then did I start to lock my door on a regular basis.
2. When the record labels stopped manufacturing LPs (circa 1990), I switched to CDs.

I've got about 2000 CDS as well............but Jimbo is the mack daddy of Cd collecting. I'm so ashamed. M.

When I was a kid in grade school in the early seventies I bought 45's and I played both sides. When I first started to buy albums I played the vinyl and looked at the cardboard artwork for the duration of the recording... well I had to get up and turn the record over. Sometimes the record would come with posters or stickers like Grand Funk Railroad's "We're An American Band" that had fist stickers and Pink Floyd's "Dark Side Of The Moon" which had two posters and a couple of stickers. Just touching the covers meant having something of tangible value.

I never had one of those popular eight-track players and a stereo that I purchased came with a cassette recorder but I never saw value in factory made cassettes. The artwork was shoddy and the tape was something that I could made at home in better quality much more cheaply.

In 1985 I bought a CD player and only a few titles were available at the time. Dire Straits "Brothers In Arms" and Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" were the first CD's that I bought. The booklets were hard to read, I was used to LP inserts. I hated the small artwork compared to the vinyl album and I think the cost was twenty five dollars each.

I have about five thousand albums and about three times that number of CD's. Many of my albums are out of print. Some are local artists or obscure things. Titles continue to come and go in and out of print so you never know. I have a about a thousand cassettes of concerts, If I get the time I'd like to digitize them and put them on CD's.

I put my entire CD collection on hard drives which took about a year of doing a few dozen or more every night in my spare time while I was going through divorce. Unfortunately the drive experienced problems before I could back it up and all but a 120 GB was lost.

So I'm not a big fan of the digital format. I like it as a way of having music on my computer and I have an iPod. I Like that Rhino has digital downloads of OOP albums that I would likely never find anywhere and for people who have no problem with it they can have instant access to music without going out of the house. I want a physical product in my hands. Of course the music industry is looking at new modes of selling their products and digital downloads ensures no returns and a lot less production costs. Young people consume music in a disposable fashion. I'm in my middle forties, judging from from the music that they are producing now, record companies are not marketing towards me anymore.

Amen to that, brother! Although one additional reason for this might be that my musical spectrum stretches quite a distance from the mainstream these days. It is somewhat ironic that marketing is aimed at the millions of casual listeners who only buy a small amount of product, as opposed to the average ICE-r here who probably spends more annually on musical purchases than an entire high school class of slackers!

By the way, welcome to the board, DogCow! MOOF!