I need help with obsessive album collecting

I still buy CDs. When possible, I order from the artist website so that they make a sale and get some money. Also, the album sales can apparently be a factor when they decide where to play when they tour.

I thought there was a limit to how many albums you could add to your library? Maybe that's only the free version.
The only problem I have with it is that I sometimes add interesting looking albums so I can listen to them at a later date, then I forget and come across them months later and have no idea why I added them.

So, yeah, collecting's Achilles' heel tends to be storage and having so much that you don't know what you have and end up buying it again. Since I've been buying more and more downloads (mostly because the band doesn't have physical product), I've finally started seeing the usefulness of not having everything in physical format - it saves space and in most cases costs less.

So, I'm in the planning stages of ripping my CD collection (ca. 2200+ albums) with the idea of boxing up the cheaper, less collectible CDs (probably will use Discogs to get an idea of value). This will allow my shelving to always have room for the more collectible ones. I built my own shelving and I've calculated that it should store about 3200 CDs. Some of it has been temporarily hijacked in recent weeks by some baseball cards (another storage project I need to figure out).

I'm also doing a book weeding project. I used to have about 1500 books, but that is now half that size as I've replaced those I got rid of with PDF versions (it helps to have access to e-book collections at an academic library). I've found switching to PDF from physical to be a natural evolution since my job has involved computers since the 1990s. I do sometimes take my laptop to bed to read. Sounds weird, but works for me.

Anyway, I'm guilty of having a collection where many things may never get listened to again due to the size of the collection. For some reason, it doesn't bother me. With billions of people on the planet and it being so much easier to produce your own music without a record company's involvement, we were bound to become overwhelmed by art. The Prog Archives database has almost 13,000 bands and artists and over 90,000 albums, EPs, singles, etc. All we can ever hope for is that we scratch the surface of such a database and hope we find something that means something to us. I believe there are over 2 million artists on Bandcamp. Good luck with that one!

A collection also needs to be well organised so you can pinpoint anything easily, and know what you've already got. For example my music is stored alphabetically by artist, and then by original release date.

My DVD/Blu-ray collection is split into loose genres e.g. arthouse, mainstream, family, superheroes, vampire themed, etc etc, and then simply alphabetcally by title. My music DVD's/Blu-rays and box sets are in a separate storage cupboard.