About ten years ago, I decided that I was going to start keeping track of how many CDs I bought each year. I was doing this mostly for curiosity's sake, so I'd mark down on a little sheet of paper a hash mark every time I got a new disc. Gradually my note taking got a little more detailed as I would include data on how many albums I bought from the current year and the year immediately prior. I wanted specifically to see how much new music I was buying for some notion about being up to date with what was happening in the present day. I also started marking down if an album was from a Canadian band. I have no idea why I started doing that, but after doing it for a decade, I'm not going to stop now. Within the last couple of years, I've started buying more vinyl and then I began picking up tapes again, so those were added to my list. I keep track of the total number of releases I buy each month for control purposes. Sometimes I add wrong and it helps to have a second set of numbers to square away the math. After looking at last year's slip of paper covered in hash marks, I decided that I was going to make a form to record all the data on. This is what I came up with. It has columns for CDs, records, tapes, the current year, the previous year, the Canadian content column and a total for each month.
