This is Rob Long with Martini Shot on KCRW.
I'm sort of a neat person. I try to stay organized. Not out of any creepy OCD kind of thing – I mean, I know a guy who, when he buys a new package of athletic socks, labels and numbers them with a sharpie – you know, 1L, 1R, for pair number one, left foot, pair number one, right foot. Just in case.
That's not me. I'm organized and neat because I'm a writer, and if I didn't keep myself and my mind corralled by a certain amount of order, the whole me operation would cascade down into madness, with books and shoes and flip flops all over the house, bowls of cereal on the windowsill, phone calls and emails not even read, let alone returned, piles of papers here and there, some stamped with alarming words like "FINAL" and "LEGAL."
So a few years ago, I gathered up all of my CD's and ripped them into a huge hard-drive. I put them all – almost 600 of them (I know, I know) into my computer. And the feeling was incredible. The feeling of power. Of mastery. I could listen to any one of them – anything – with a few clicks. No sorting, no racing, no stacks of jewel cases, no plastic little nubbins to crack off of the case and land invisibly on the floor.
I have 88 gigabytes of music. According to iTunes, it would take 64.8 straight days of listening to hear it all.
Which is nothing, NOTHING, compared to what they have here, at this station. This summer, we're raising money for the KCRW Music Library – to do professionally and efficiently and on a much huger scale – what I did with all of my CD's. Digitize them. Sort them. Index them. Make them instantly available, instantly playable, instantly accessible to the eclectic, surprising, unpredictable, wide-ranging and endlessly fascinating group of DJ's who make KCRW such a great place to listen to music. Think of the KCRW Music Library as YOUR music library. Think of the hum and glow of its music harddrive as YOUR music harddrive, buzzing away with interesting and unexpected choices. And also, think how much neater the place will be. Without all of those little plastic nubbins lying around.
If you love music, you already know that KCRW is the place for you. And if you love music, the KCRW Music Library needs you. So please, subscribe today. Just call 800-600-KCRW. That's 800-600-um, look on your phone. Or, online, anytime, at KCRW.com.
For KCRW, this is Rob Long with Martini Shot.