Gracenote’s media database shows 97,206,484 songs

For our calculation lets assume 50% are duplicate version of tracks on compilation albums.

ie 48603242 songs multiplied by the average track length of 4 minutes =

194412968 minutes of music

divided by 60 minutes per hour =

3240216.133333333767951 hours of music

divided by 24 = 135009 days of music

or 369.887686 years to listen to all of human musical output known of by the gracenote database currently in one continuous session without sleep.

with sleep of eight hours a day ?

491.94 years

ie for a human just to to try and appreciates all of human musical output currently ie to listen to each song a few times and appreciate the merit of such music made, would involve probably around 30 current lifetimes thats with an imaginary suspension on listening to any of the new music being created.

lets go a little further how much storage would it take ?

lets say on average one day of quality Mp3(192kbps-320Kbps) listening takes up 1.828 Gb of storage on average
so one years worth listening takes up 667.29Gb’s
so 369 years x 667.29Gb’s = 246.231.05 Gb’s

or 246 terabytes of storage im not sure whether spatial storing of bits is going to catch up with the rate of human musical output to mean you could ever have the entire of human musical output on a series of drives in your house.

but with 4tb drives it would be around 62 4tb usb2 drives. of course copying the tracks onto the drive would take a long time.

so 246,231,000 Mb’s copying at say a maximum of 40Mb’s on to such drives via USB2, would take 71.2 days to copy the data between a set drives, very bearable in comparison to the listening time involced ?

lets imagine its a sata to sata copy at around 100Mbs then it would still take 28.49 days to copy the data.

ok lets imagine that the songs are on a series of raided ssd drives capable of copying at 600 Mb’s they could achieve the copying task in 4.744 days