Collection Count

Collection Count tracks my DVD/Blu-ray collection via a number of statistics every week.

This week, I tip over 1,500 titles in my collection -- again. I barely noted it last time, but what I meant to do was compare it to this, a record of my DVD collection at 750 titles, four years and eight months ago. After the regular stats, then, there's a replica of that post with new stats.

Number of titles in collection: 1,501 [up 4]
Of which DVDs: 1,144 [up 2]
Of which Blu-rays: 357 [up 2]

Number of discs in collection: 3,743 [up 4]
Number of films in collection: 1,544 [up 6]
Number of TV episodes in collection: 5,689 [no change]
Number of short films in collection: 370 [no change]

So, as mentioned, here are those new numbers.

We begin with ones you know: that I now own 1,501 titles with a grand total of 3,743 discs. That's an average of 2.494 discs per title -- slightly higher than last time's 2.367, but not by much. Box sets and multiple-discs-for-single-films are only slightly more prevalent, then.

Last time I listed my eight largest individual sets. This time it will be nine, because there are three tied at seventh place; plus one drops out, so there's only two new ones here: the complete Lost on Blu-ray (36) and The Sopranos (30). The others remain Angel (30), Babylon 5 with Crusade and TV movies (41), The Bergman Collection (30), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (39), Farscape (42), The West Wing (44) and The X-Files (59). If we take eight of them (ignoring one of the three 30s), these 0.53% of my titles make up 8.58% of my discs -- it might sound a lot, but it's nothing like as big as last time.

A fairer way to look at it might be to again take the top 1%-ish of titles and see how many discs they contribute -- I imagine that's what I was going for last time, and why I did the top eight sets rather than ten. Last time that single percentile accounted for 17.5% of my discs; now it's 13.2%. Clearly I've not bought so many huge box sets in the past few years... though come Christmas the ginormous Harry Potter set will kick things up a little further.

What about the spread of decades -- do I own many films? Last time the largest part of my collection was the then-present '00s, at a massive 52%; now, it's 46.8%. It's nice that I've spread things around a bit more, but then since then we've changed decade -- the last three years are the '10s (obviously). They've already contributed 7.3%, which together with the '00s makes 54.1%... but that's covering 13 years, not last time's 10, so it's all a bit scruffy. Either way, the '00s are already in fifth place -- ahead are the '90s at 13.99% (formerly 20.6%), the '80s at 9.2% (formerly 10.2%), and the '70s at 7.9% (formerly 7%). It's interesting that the proportion of '70s films has grown as my collection doubled -- wouldn't've called that one.

I imagine some of the other slides are due to the '00s diluting the waters, and maybe earlier decades bulking up. The 1890s and 1900s weren't present last time, though they account for a grand total of 0.1998%; the '10s increase marginally, from 0.2% to 0.3%, while the '20s are more significant, up from 0.6% to 1.67%. The remaining decades all see their percentage share increase too: the '30s up to 1.87% (from 1.3%), the '40s to 2.07% (from 1.6%), the '50s to 2.47% (from 1.3%), and the '60s to 5.66% (from 5%). I guess this general spread of increases accounts for the drops elsewhere -- I've clearly bought primarily new releases and a lot of older titles, and not so many from the '90s and '80s. So there you have it.

I've at this point noted how arbitrary many of the remaining stats are -- even more so than those decades. Maybe that's why I skipped them last time.

I will take a look at the ever-popular running time, though. Last time that came to 118 days, 18 hours and 55 minutes. Now, it's 271 days, 23 hours and 41 minutes. the number of titles has (just over) doubled, but the running time has clearly much more than -- closer to two-and-a-half times as big, actually. Box sets, I guess.

So that's that then. See you next week, faithful reader.