How do you sort your LPs?


How do you sort your LPs?
By:
1. Alphabetical Genre
2. Alphabetical Artist
3. Most listened
4. Others
I have procrastinated in organizing my collection. No excuses now.

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Record store style. Worked at one in the 70s. Stuck with me.
Genre. Within genre alphabetized by last name of artist or band name. Jackson Browne in rock under B. J Geils Band in rock under J.
Amount of records would be a consideration. I you only have 200-300 records it might not make sense to put them in genres. 
I no longer own any LPs and my CDs are ripped upon arrival then go to storage however I still face many of the same issues devising a digital archive.  I have about 53,000 songs from about 4,000 CDs.  I add about 400 CDs each year to my archive. I have spent considerable time and effort working out my rules so I pray this may be useful to others.


CDs are first sorted by genre. As noted this can cause issues with performers who cross genre often. I use Allmusic as the authority, what ever Allmusic.com lists as the first/top genre for an artist that settles the issue. If for example Willie Nelson is a Country artist than even his gospel CDs are Country genre. I want all of an Artist’s work in one genre where I can find it by artist.

 I see no benefit sorting by micro genre or decade and I often combine major genre which helps categorize many performers.  So Jazz and Blues are combined into Jazz-Blues. As is Rock-Pop, Stage-Screen and Country-Folk.

 I have a genre for Christmas which includes all holiday music, another for Classical of course. Audiophile genre is sorted by record Label such as Chesky, Telarc, Works of Art (AudioQuest).

 Almost every genre has a “Various” directory for compilations.

 Recording artists are alphabetical by first name with in genre so Jazz-Blues starts with Al diMeola then Al Jarreau and Al Jolson.

 I discard any “The” preface. And any second billing isn’t. So I also discard “Quartet” for example. Arthur Fiedler gets all the credit and the Boston Pops is ignored. Cannonball Adderley was a solo act by my rules because that is how I want to look it up and I want all the Cannonball Adderley in one directory no matter the billing.

 Within an artist’s directory CD’s are prefaced by (yyyy) four digit date so the artist’s work is always sorted chronologically.  The exception is within Stage and Screen which are not by artist but in the format Title (yyyy) so I can look up the movie by name. Example: West Side Story (1984)

 I have a genre “Easy Listening” which includes many difficult to file CDs.  London Symphony Orchestra has numerous symphonic rock-pop CDs.  Is it Classical or Rock or Pop? It is all easy listening.

 One can created play lists by copying file into a directory. So I have Demo directory for music to evaluate or show of systems.  A few artists have a directory titled BIN so I can listen to their entire repertoire with out jumping from CD to CD.

 I hope this helps. What works well for a digital archive may not work for LPs.

 When I had LPs I had all those sticky color coded end tabs that one uses to file physical office files  I would two tabs per LP so I could look across the room and see where a where on a shelf a LP belonged from 15 feet away.  I can’t find any now on Amazon but any good office supply place will have them and I highly recommend them.