How many soundtrack CDs are there ?

Some of us have this desire to have every soundtrack there is, was and ever will be. But how many would that be ?

There are some among us who have a collection of 10.000 +, which seems quite a lot. But is it so much compared to everything there is ?

Let's just make a rough estimation. Let us assume that the six main soundtrack producing countries (USA, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and Spain) each issue 5 releases every week. This is not too much if you count in every movie and TV score available. Soundtracks got releases more often since the beginning of the 60ies, so let's start with 1962.

So this would be 6 countries * 44 years * 52 weeks * 5 releases, which makes a total of 68.640 releases. This does not count in game scores and promo releases, which there are more and more the last years. Plus the soundtrack-related things by our favorite composers (John Williams made a hundred of them alone since 1955). Bollywood isn't even counted in !

In total I think we can take a figure of 75.000 LPs and CDs which are interesting for us soundtrack collectors. So if you have 10.000 releases so far, you have 13,33 % of these. Happy collecting !

And let us further assume that you find Aladdin's wonder lamp and wish yourself all these things. How long would it take to hear them ? Let's take 40 min per release, which makes 3.000.000 minutes in total, which are 50.000 hours. If you hear 6 Hours a day, you will need 8.333 days to listen to all the records, which makes up for 22,83 Years.

So if you are a collector like myself who grew up in the silver age, you may just listen to all of them and then say "Hello Jerry, Elmer and Miklos, I've just listened to all of your records."