Yep, everything.


"Help, I'm a cop!"

They all go under Zappa down my way, and are arranged in numerical order of Rykodisc catalog number. After that they're roughly chronological.

Tell me first of all how resolving this will dramatically improve your life or make the world a better place for humanity.

I don't put my collection into any sort of order, too much work.

I have all of my Zappa CD's filed under F and in chronological order.

I had this problem with Frank Black and the Catholics.

As a solution, I just threw all those CD's away.

Same here for The Rolling Stones. File under T for The, R for Rolling, S for Stones, or F for Fucking Cool Shit.

What this man says is also exactly how I do it.

haha :D

All my music's ordered alphabetically. I used to have trouble with this kind of thing, I didn't know whether I should arrange albums chronologically or alphabetically, eventually I went for the latter. I didn't know if I should put my Syd Barrett stuff with Pink Floyd, but I decided he was good enough to be filed by himself.
If the name on the album is Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention, then it should just go under Z.
By the way, I have Ciccone Youth under C.

Good point. I should probably stop discussing music-related things on a music-related message board. You just saved me time!

Ha, ha, no, no, it just seems a little, well, overly obsessive. I mean, does it make any difference?

To me it does, yes. And OF COURSE it's overly obsessive. I surely will not deny that. But yeah, little things about the arrangement of my music collection will really bug me sometimes. THat's why I was curious what other collectors did in such a situation.

Putting Mothers albums under M, is "right" in the sense that THAT's how the band actually wanted those albums to be considered (ie: as Mothers albums, NOT Zappa albums... which is especially obvious when they were Mothers albums released AFTER the band broke up). But at the same time, filing the Mothers albums under Z (considering them as FRANK ZAPPA AND THE MOTHERS) means that all Zappa will remain together so that when I'm in the mood, I can easily look thru one little section.

And really, I just used Zappa as an example. We could be talking about Kool Keith's, MF Doom's or Robert Pollard's hundreds of alter-egos. We could be talking about Bjork/Sugarcubes, Ryan Adams/Whiskeytown/The Finger, 2Pac/Tupac Shakur/Makavelli/Thug Life, or any other band artist who's had one-offs, side-projects, name changes, etc.

I tend to just go with what's on the jacket sleeve/LP spine. If it says "Mothers" instead of "Frank Zappa and the Mothers", for example, it would go in the M section.

I alphabetize by the first letter of the first word in a band's name disregarding articles (e.g., The Beatles go in the B section), but individuals usually by the last name (e.g., John Lennon in the L section).

I'm guessing this is what most of us do.

Actually that's exactly how I tend to do it. (going by the spine/cover name).

....

Man, "Valley girl" is a shitty song, eh? They play that at work all the time. Didn't even realize it was Zappa until I looked it up online.

You dont like it? I think it's pretty hilarious. I actually just picked up SHIP ARRIVING TOO LATE last week.

And where do you work that would play FZ?

A grocery store.

"Valley Girl" was apparently a really popular song, in fact it Zappa's most popular.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_Girl_(song)

# 32 on the top 40 singles.

So, it's not too bizarre that they'd play that song.