Saturday 31 December 2011

Buy Nothing Year

I have decided to set myself a challenge for 2012, which is called Buy Nothing Year. Now obviously the thought of buying nothing at all is crazy, but the idea is to not buy any new (to me, as opposed to new releases) CDs, books or DVDs in the year.


Over Christmas I have been looking at a carrier bag full of CDs to be listened to, one whose contents have fluctuated over the year, but has stayed at pretty much the same level. And unless I address this, I’ll always be playing catch up. Some albums deserve to be listened to repeated times, and some take a few listens to fully appreciate them. Hopefully doing this will free up time to enjoy the albums I already have more. It’s also one of the reasons I have virtually stopped doing reviews and gigs for now, as I was wading through so much new music and so much of it was pretty awful. Listening to eight submissions takes up the time I could have listened to a good album. On top of this, there is similar pile of books and a smaller pile of DVDs that need attention too.


The other reason for doing this is the lack of space in the house to put more and more stuff.


I’ve no doubt I’ll find this difficult, but it’ll be an interesting experiment. The main difficulty will not be stopping buying new stuff, but avoiding record fairs and charity shops.


This has been partly inspired by the following:

The National Pop Strike

Buy Nothing Day

No Music Day


And this article here makes interesting reading in conjunction with this challenge.