How much of a completist are you?

Like, at what point do you consider a collection complete for a band? Do you need every studio album, even ones you may not like? Do you buy comps, for one song? Do you need every live album? Every demo track, regardless of sound quality?

Just curious to what extent some people complete their collections.

Years ago when I first started collecting CDs, I was one of those fanatics who thought he had to own every single recorded work by my favorite bands. I'd try to collect all of their studio/live albums, any CD singles that might have extra tracks, movie soundtracks that they appeared on, any bootlegs/promos that I could find, etc., etc.

After a while that was becaming too much of a friggin' hassle (not to mention prohibitively expensive!!), plus I was piling up tons of CDs with only one or two tracks on them that I liked, and therefore never listened to. Storage space was also becoming an issue. So in the late 90s I cleared a lot of stuff off my shelves, separated the "wheat" from the "chaff" so to speak, and got rid of a lot of the "extra" stuff.

Nowadays if I have all of a band's studio discography and/or a live album or two, I consider their collection more or less "complete."

Fat Freddy wrote:

Nowadays if I have all of a band's studio discography and/or a live album or two, I consider their collection more or less "complete."

That's pretty much how I am. And I also used to feel the need to own everything ever put down on tape. Too difficult. Also, if there is an album I know I don't like from a band, I am perfectly fine not owning it, just for the sake of a complete collection.

I suppose I'm on the far end of the spectrum in that regard. Usually just the studio albums on cd do it for me. I'll throw in some ep's or live albums if I'm a big enough fan, but I don't considder them essential. I used to get greatest hits packages, but not so much anymore for just one or 2 songs for bands I know.

I don't collect other formats or dvds.

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Also, if there is an album I know I don't like from a band, I am perfectly fine not owning it, just for the sake of a complete collection.

Yeah, I'm the same way. Like, I love W.A.S.P., but the K.F.D. and Neon God albums did nothin' for me so eventually I ditched those.

On the other hand, I still hang onto stuff like Judas Priest's Demolition and Iron Maiden's The X Factor for some reason. Possibly because I know if I tried to get rid of 'em, nobody would want them.

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On the other hand, I still hang onto Judas Priest's Demolition and Iron Maiden's The X Factor for some reason. Possibly because I know if I tried to get rid of 'em, nobody would want them.

I feel that way about St. Anger. I hate that album. Haven't listened to it in years, yet I can't let it go.

MetalGuy71 wrote:

I feel that way about St. Anger. I hate that album. Haven't listened to it in years, yet I can't let it go.

My copy of St. Anger went to a friend in Texas only a week or two after I bought it. I don't miss it a bit.

The word on the street for that disc was so bad when it came out that my buddy had asked me to burn him a copy to check out before he risked plunking down his own cash for it, which I was willing to do. But after I listened to it a couple of times I hated it so much that I simply said "Y'know what, hell with it, you can HAVE this thing," packed it up and shipped it off to him.

...and my buddy didn't like it either. Last I heard it's still gathering dust on a shelf at his place.

Depends on the band, honestly. I do buy comps for one new song. I will buy live albums. Some bands, I just want anything with their name on it.

Some bands who have multiple comps each with exclusive songs I'll sometimes just get all the comps because, by doing that, I'll end up with 40-50 unique songs. But even then, when I see the studio albums cheap I'll grab them if I like them enough.

Not a completist at all anymore, I've been moving in a "weeding out" direction for several years, trimming things down until I just have the stuff that really inspires me.

My rule: If I don't listen to an album for 2 years, I don't need to own it.

S.D. wrote:

My rule: If I don't listen to an album for 2 years, I don't need to own it.

I've gotten rid of stuff for that reason before as well. Those are the kinds of things that I do like, but hardly ever reach for...so with things like Spotify, I don't need to own it. If I want to hear it, I'll dial it up, jam a couple of songs, and move on.

Shawn Of Fire wrote:

S.D. wrote:

My rule: If I don't listen to an album for 2 years, I don't need to own it.

I've gotten rid of stuff for that reason before as well. Those are the kinds of things that I do like, but hardly ever reach for...so with things like Spotify, I don't need to own it. If I want to hear it, I'll dial it up, jam a couple of songs, and move on.

I've done some of that too. Well, try to anyway. If I haven't played it in awhile or I play it in the car and I can't get through to the end on my commute, out it goes.

I try to collect all of a band's studio tracks (be it full albums,an extra track or 2 on comps,singles or tacked on at the end of live albums-even though I normally would not buy a live album) if possible. Sometimes that gets a little tricky trying to find.

If I listen to it I try to get at least every studio album, if its possible or not costly. The bands that are more my favorites I do collect a little more of, like live albums and sometimes best of's. Some bands like Helloween, Gamma Ray, Iron Maiden, Blind Guardian, King Diamond, Mercyful Fate and a few others I have multiple versions of the same albums. I only do that with those few bands though. Helloween is my biggest collection. I got all the original albums, then I got the remasters of all those albums and some Japanese releases with an extra booklet or songs, all the singles, live albums, dvds etc. The one thing that I want and don't have yet is the Rabbit Don't Come Easy Top Hat Boxset.

Not anymore. I was like FF and had to have absolutely everything that a band has put out. With the exception of a few bands, I just buy the albums I like and call it good.

In the case of bands like Aerosmith, Scorpions, Whitesnake, Stryper, and a few others; when I have all the studio albums and a live album and maybe a DVD, I will consider that complete. Then there are bands like Accept where I really like the last 2 albums but I am not a huge UDO fan so that era of albums is more geared for greatest hits packages (to my ears anyway). Kiske era Helloween is the same scenario.

I collect all the studio and live albums, and usually add at least one comp disc. I also collect concert DVD's, so I would say I am a completist, but I do not collect singles or buy multi'sof the same albums. Once in awhile I will buy the same disc twice if I am major fan but I rarely do that.

manny wrote:

I collect all the studio and live albums, and usually add at least one comp disc. I also collect concert DVD's, so I would say I am a completist, but I do not collect singles or buy multi'sof the same albums. Once in awhile I will buy the same disc twice if I am major fan but I rarely do that.

The only albums that I have multiple copies of is Demon Hunters "the Triptych" because they originally released the album with 3 different covers and later on released a special edition with yet another cover. The other is The Showdown's "Temptation Come My Way" as the release for the Christian bookstores was missing a track that was on the original release.

To answer the original question:

I collect all the main releases from bands I follow / like. I am prepared that some albums I will not like or not like as much. More often than not, I find that whilst I like all the albums of a band I follow, I like them to varying degrees - some a lot (where I like every song) and some less (where I might like a couple of songs but do not deem the album to be overall consistent).

I like having all the studio albums by a band I follow. When I say a band I follow, I really mean is any band that belongs as part of my physical collection of albums is a band I follow.

In some cases where the band's albums are difficult to find or out of print, I collect just the albums I can actually find as original copies (I don't like having any bootlegs in my collection).

I am not in the habit of collecting live albums (unless they are must-haves or form part of a collection where the spine label creates a picture or the band's logo e.g. Priest, Maiden).

Similarly, I am also not in the habit of collecting EPs. However, with EPs it can get tricky. Some EPs have exclusive material, whether new songs or unreleased (of substance) material (i.e. not live tracks). It really depends on the nature of the EP. The flip-side is bands tend to release 'unreleased' songs (featured on EPs) as part of a complete album of such material (Autopsy did so recently where they released a collection of all their EPs and other unreleased material).

Well with me it is usually bands that from their debuts that grab me I usually buy everything. Especially bands from the 70's, UFO, Nazareth, Scorpions, BOC and a few others. Alot of bands from the 90's to the present I do as well Primal Fear, Annihilator, Black Majesty, Rebellion.........

I do consider myself a completeist to a point. If the band grabs me then yes I buy all of their material.

Metalwargod

I'll only buy live albums, EPs, and singles if I can find them cheap enough. With most bands I'm perfectly happy just collecting the studio albums. I also try to not obsess over bonus tracks or imports.

I used to be /still am with some bands. After all, I just got an Yugoslavian version Of Uriah Heep - Conquest because it was the cheaper(including shipping!!!) than the one at The Beat.

Wargod wrote:

Well with me it is usually bands that from their debuts that grab me I usually buy everything. Especially bands from the 70's, UFO, Nazareth, Scorpions, BOC and a few others. Alot of bands from the 90's to the present I do as well Primal Fear, Annihilator, Black Majesty, Rebellion.........

I do consider myself a completeist to a point. If the band grabs me then yes I buy all of their material.

Metalwargod

That's basically it, if I like say 3 or 4 albums from a band and they have another 2 or 3 so so then I say stuff it I'll get them all because eventually I will come to realise what they were doing on those albums I like less and have a better understanding of how they evolved.

On the point of debuts - not all are strong and not all debuts are readily available when I start collecting a band so I may in fact work my way backwards from a certain release that grabbed me.

jstate wrote:

I'll only buy live albums, EPs, and singles if I can find them cheap enough. With most bands I'm perfectly happy just collecting the studio albums. I also try to not obsess over bonus tracks or imports.

Live albums can be a tricky one. Some bands have tons and tons of live albums and very few studio albums. I will only get the essential live albums not those licensed to various labels that didn't release any of their studio albums. It also depends on the actual live album, what era is it from.

EPs and b-sides on singles are not absolute must haves for me. More often than not, b-sides end up as bonus songs on re-issues or on future compilations made up of b-sides / live stuff (Hammerfall have one which I really want to get and has basically all their cover songs from various singles they released in the last decade).

I am not too hot for live albums to be honest. I get the point but I dont make them a priority.

One problem I have with including live albums is that a lot of bands that do live albums tend to do a lot of live albums. So it comes down to not only not feeling the need to own them but also keeping track of what has gotten released. I still couldn't tell you what I have or don't when it comes to live Maiden or Priest. And these days even if I come across one I just err on the side of I might have it and if I don't do I really need another. This isn't knock on the quality of the product just my own personal quirk when it comes to discography.

I'll also add I'm not a fan of the obvious over-dubbing that occurs with most. Give it to me as it was - mistakes and all. I'd prefer a rougher sounding live show as is than one "fixed" later on.

It depends for me, when it comes to Bowie, Foo Fighters, STP, Aerosmith I am a completeist, with the exception of Aerosmith with them its just the studio albums

Fat Freddy wrote:

Years ago when I first started collecting CDs, I was one of those fanatics who thought he had to own every single recorded work by my favorite bands. I'd try to collect all of their studio/live albums, any CD singles that might have extra tracks, movie soundtracks that they appeared on, any bootlegs/promos that I could find, etc., etc.

After a while that was becaming too much of a friggin' hassle (not to mention prohibitively expensive!!), plus I was piling up tons of CDs with only one or two tracks on them that I liked, and therefore never listened to. Storage space was also becoming an issue. So in the late 90s I cleared a lot of stuff off my shelves, separated the "wheat" from the "chaff" so to speak, and got rid of a lot of the "extra" stuff.

Nowadays if I have all of a band's studio discography and/or a live album or two, I consider their collection more or less "complete."

Same here. I noticed the pointlessness of collecting all that stuff around the time System of a Down's second album came out. Somehow I became the Internet guru on all things System because I created this detailed discography that a bunch of sites shared, plus I had all their early demos and some really rare promo stuff. So I got inundated with e-mails asking all kinds of crazy questions from fans.

At first I thought it was cool, then it got REALLY annoying. Haha. And through it all, I looked at my collection of albums by them and realized I had, for instance, three separate promo singles for "Sugar," all of which had the same track but differences in the inserts or CD artwork. And this sort of thing is repeated over and over and over throughout my collection. It's all utterly pointless!

So I don't bother actively seeking this stuff out these days. If I happen upon a used-bin promo for $0.99 I'll grab it, because I am still a weirdo collector, but I don't pursue this stuff anymore.

And thankfully no one bugs me about System of A Down anymore aside from one guy who somehow tracked me down through Shock Totem, and every now and then sends me a hilarious PM (because his English is terrible) wanting to trade, or ask me about something, or show me something cool he's gotten. But I love that guy. He cracks me up.