I’ve just opened my iTunes and I am disgusted. That’s not my normal reaction, I’m usually reassured. Reassured that my 895 albums, 28.2 days, and 90.30 GB of music will mean I can feel (and act) very smug when streaming gets ruined by exclusivity deals. 

 There’s an overwhelming amount of stuff in the digital loft space of my iTunes library. I want to shut the (metaphorical) hatch and walk away, or do what the (literal) previous owners of my house did: claim to be doing me a favour by leaving two malting plastic Christmas trees in the roof, a set of children’s flippers beneath the floor, and a haunting, faded Teletubbies duvet cover in the garage. My equivalent digital music trash would be: the iTunes 12 Days of Christmas giveaway singles (almost as bad as the free U2 album), a selection of unofficial mash-ups from that period when I thought the Times Like These / Sweet Child o’ Mine mash-up was the height of musical genius (accompanied by dodgy homemade artwork made in my free copy of Photoshop Elements), and Agadoo.mp3 (no comment).

 My iTunes contains every piece of music I’ve ever owned. Not just a curated selection of sentimental items, but a hoarder’s den piled high with everything from the taste-shaping to the cringe-inducing. Do you remember the foil-clad Ukranian Verka Serduchka from Eurovision 2007? She’s in there. I’ve got an 8-bit version of OK Computer because I heard it on Soundcloud once and thought it was kinda neat. I’d completely forgotten the existence of the Gorillaz Smooth Jazz Tribute album that I bought because an identity crisis lead me to believe that I was a coffee shop both ran by and for wankers. 

 The live tracks that bands gave away for free for signing up to their email lists are like defunct currency from a holiday I went on 10 years ago. OK Go have some great songs but I don’t need mp3s of them live from Hamburg. 

 It’s like scrolling through my Facebook friends list and realising how many people on there are not, in fact, my friends. Sure, I got along with that one single on Partie Traumatic but that’s as deep as it went. I have Uno by Green Day because we have some mutual friends but we’d ever hang out one-on-one. And the less said about that brief fling with Beady Eye the better. 

 But there are some real gems nestled between the Spanish version of You’ve Got a Friend in Me from Toy Story 3 and David Bowie’s The Laughing Gnome. There are strange little nuggets that you can’t find on Spotify, like The Vaccines’ cover of The Winner Takes it All or The Avalanches’ radio mixes that they couldn’t get copyright clearance for. I like having this stuff in there and knowing that it can’t vanish one day because a corporation erased it or an artist decided to edit it. And I do still have a nostalgia for the time when music listening didn’t revolve around algorithmic playlists (as helpful as they can be). I still love to listen to a full album and that’s part of the joyful nostalgia for the iPod era, it’s the reason I still have an iTunes library and two iPod Classics. For me, using them has the same sense of ritual that people enjoy when they put on a vinyl record. 

 But perhaps this disgust at my junk-filled iTunes shows that I’ve been nostalgic for the wrong era of iPod. It’s the restraint of my second generation iPod Nano that I really miss. With only 8GB to play with, every song had to count. There was no room to store The Pink Panther theme on the off chance that I wanted to soundtrack some sneaking around. There was only room for the total of five tracks that I actually want to hear from the combined 32 tracks of The Essential Bruce Springsteen and Soundgarden: A-Sides. But there was room for The Hoosiers full discography because they remain criminally underrated. 

 So yes, I’ve done some digital spring cleaning, but I haven’t even started on the 200+ CDs accumulating dust in my living room. They can wait for next spring.