I don’t have a LOT of music cds (around 300) compared to some people I know who have thousands, but since buying them starting around 1990 I find it strange that for the majority of them I can recall the exact store I bought them from.
I can take just about any CD in my collection and remember where I got it.
Musicland at Southridge Mall, Radio Doctors in downtown Milwaukee, Atomic Records at the UWM campus, Best Buy in Melbourne Florida, Best Buy in Daytona, FYE in a mall in Naples, Down in the Valley Records, Virgin Records at Disney, Tower Records in London, off of Amazon.com, Sam Goody Minneapolis, etc. etc.
The only ones I remember are gems I got in the bargain bin for a few bucks, particularly from this one shop in CT. They are the impetus to keep looking because there just might be that treasure you can’t live without somewhere in the bin.
Sure! I’ve got 5360-odd CDs, but I can remember where I was when I bought certain ones - Sam The Record Man or HMV or Kops Collectables in Toronto, a couple used record stores in Hamilton whose names have escaped me (it’s been ten years), Sam Goody, a long-since-defunct record store, and a humungous book store with a CD section in Jacksonville, a collector’s store in Orlando, the weekly flea market at FSU in Tallahassee… I don’t often get to browse in stores anymore. Most of my collecting is done online these days.
I remember standing in Best Buy in Winston-Salem and discovering that the Risky Business soundtrack had been released (or, more likely, re-released) on CD and briefly considering buying 2 to make sure I was never, ever again without it. (I won’t bore you with my years-long search for the LP and my glee at finding it in a used record store.)
I remember getting pissed off when I opened the 2-disc Superman soundtrack I bought through half.com to find that the seller had sent me the 1-disc version instead. And how much more pissed off I got later when they wouldn’t replace it with the right thing because “the UPC is right, so it’s not our fault.” Dickheads.
Funny that this should come up now: this weekend, I came across a cassette tape upon which I had recorded “Real Real Gone” from a CD I bought in 1993 of The Best of Van Morrison Vol II.
Listening to the cassette, I was back in 1993 and the college-town music shop in which I bought the original CD. I then got to thinking whether I could remember where I bought other CDs (not a huge collections – several hundred at most), and, by golly, I can – nearly every single one.
You guys are good. I own 6 CDs (that I can currently find, anyway - music isn’t my thing) and the only reason I know I got them all at either Amazon or Walmart is because those are the only two places I’ve ever bought CDs.
In typical geezer fashion, I remember very little about the origins of my CDs, yet I have some vivid memories of where and under what circumstances I bought LPs forty years ago, when I was in college.
I do remember some of them, specifically the ones that came from concerts or from The Donkey, my favorite coffee shop that sells random CDs every now and then…