  The last time I went out to work on a regular basis, I would step out every lunchtime to a secondhand CD store, and I would seldom leave the place empty-handed.
Usually I would be carrying four or sometimes more CDs to get me through the afternoon. I believe I bought something like 800 of the things during the two year contract. I did have a lot of catching up to do, though; I'd only acquired my very first CD player, if you can believe this, in December 1998, and for a full decade before that, I'd been in no position to buy music, so I'd amassed huge numbers of tapes. A fair proportion of the music I'd enjoyed through those years on cassette tape was the music I bought secondhand in Camberwell. Now I'm working in a kind of grey area between Islington and Hackney, and there are several secondhand music places within striking distance, but in two weeks, and not for the want of searching, nor of inclination, I have bought only one secondhand CD. It is I Am Shelby Lynne , by erm, Shelby Lynne. The MP3s are encoding as I type this. (One track from this album, the wonderful Leavin' , has been a playlist fixture for more than a year, and I'm hoping that it isn't the best track on there by too wide a margin.
) Why am blathering on like this? Oh yes. Why am I not buying shedloads of new music anymore? I already have more music than any sensible person could want or need. Actually, about three or four times as much as any sensible person could want or need, and more than most of , you know, the other kind. I'm already spending too much time even deciding what to play next. I can move ridiculous amounts of music around with me on MP3. I don't have a portable player yet, but every day I've been carrying three or four CDs from my backup box into work and copying a selection onto hard disk at work.
That hard disk is now positively groaning with the stuff. Perhaps I have more or less caught up with my tastes. There isn't really that much new music that interests me enough for me to make speculative purchases, which have always been an extravegance, and long may they remain so... 
