I’ve just deleted 20,362 music files from my computer. Over 1,400 hours of music, gone. I feel like a wave of liberation has washed over me, or something.

What’s going on? Simple. 25 years after I bought my first album (Meat Loaf’s Bat out of Hell II), I have turned my back on music ownership.

Not buying music. I stopped doing that years ago. No, I’ve given up owning music at all. From now on, with help from the apparently-good people at Napster, I’m going to be a “subscriber”. I pay a monthly fee, I listen to what I want. I stop paying, it all stops working. Simple.

But why, you ask? Why would I give up on one of the most quintessential hobbies of modern times - building a music collection? Especially one as, frankly, ludicrously large as I had built up?

I’ll tell you why. Because I felt trapped. My music collection has sucked hours, days, from my life. Not time spent listening to music, oh no. I’m talking about time spent administering music. Even before there were downloads, I spent hours at University copying my friends’ record collections onto MiniDisc. If I borrowed an album, I wouldn’t just listen to it, oh no. I’d copy it, painstakingly enter the titles on the remote control, give it back, and maybe - just maybe - listen to it a few weeks later. I have a box of over 100 minidiscs up in my mum’s loft, representing hours I could have spent studying, reading, or meeting people. And a fair few have never been listened to.

When PC music came along, it just got worse. Tom still gets nightmares, I imagine, remembering the 2 solid days and nights I spent in his room, almost without sleep, converting his entire WMA music collection (itself largely nicked) to MP3 to play with my new MP3 CD player. Again, I only listened to odd bits of it. Once I started actually owning digital music on a hard drive, it just got worse. Now I could waste hours correcting “metadata”. Adding the track number to the title. Removing it again. Correcting the year. Adding the cover art. For the first year after I moved to London, I didn’t even have a computer. Just a 80GB hard drive, full of music, and a crappy 20GB player I occasionally synced it with. I used to spend hours in an internet cafe fiddling with my music collection.

What is it about music that brings out the nerd in me? I don’t feel the need to suck up, hoover-like, people’s photographs, movies, or anything else. I think it’s partly because, unlike movies, music are something I enjoy repeatedly (I’m aware that movies work this way for other people, but not for me, generally). I need to own that album, not just borrow it, because I might want to listen to it in future. We might be having a party, and that track might be just perfect for a particular moment. So I have to have it, to keep it. And then, it’s part of the collection. And so it’s naturally got to have cover art, and to be properly sorted, and so on.

And on it’s gone, grabbing and copying and downloading and tagging as my collection has just got vaster and vaster and vaster. I’ve gone through three - three! - new hard drives in the last two years trying to keep up with it. And I’ve wasted hours just fiddling with Windows Media Player when I should be working, reading, or having fun.

Well, no more. Now, I just listen. If I like something, I download it, but it still isn’t mine. And far from being constraining, this is unbelievably liberating. And of course, though it has some annoying gaps, Napster’s catalogue also has some pleasing surprises included - a lot of comedy, for one.

Is this the future of music? I honestly don’t know. The vast amounts people seem to be happy to spend buying music from iTunes suggests no; but Napster seem to be doing OK with the subscription model, so good for them. My guess is that, just as some people insist on buying DVDs, some people will always want to own music.

But for me, I think those days are gone. It’s not just that it saves me hours of music geekery. It’s also had an unexpected benefit - it’s already widened my music horizons. No more flicking through my collection to see what to play. For me, it’s just a wide-open search box every time. So any band I’ve heard of and never listened to, or never got round to getting hold of, just gets listened to right away. It’s a little scary, but it’s also a great big adventure.

Napster to Go is £14.99 a month, with a free 1GB music player when you join for six months.

P.S.: One unfortunate side-effect of the transition to Napster is that it’s not Last.FM compatible. So you’ll notice the list on this page and on my Facebook profile disappearing. But hey, if you want to know what I’m listening to, just ask.

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