Welcome to week 15 of the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge. This week, we continue our living and family room clean-up by organizing and decluttering media—CDs, DVDs, records and even cassettes. If you have a large media collection, you’ll want to join in.

This post was originally published in April 2021 and republished in April 2024.

As I prepared to go through our media collection, an interesting thought struck me. With the advent of streaming services, decluttering media is a task that future generations may never need to do.

Mourning the death of physical media

Will streaming services make physical media obsolete? In the past, a new CD or DVD was a standard go-to gift for everyone in our house for every Christmas and birthday. Now that we have Netflix, Spotify and Disney+, we rarely buy physical copies of movies or music.

In some ways, this makes me sad. I often think back to the days when the highlight of my week was adding a new record to my collection. When we’d get our allowance, my sister Lorraine and I would walk downtown and pick out a new ’45 in the record department at Woolco. Then we’d split an order of fries and gravy at the lunch counter before heading home to listen to our new-found treasures.

If we’d saved up our money to buy a new LP, we’d spend hours poring over the album cover. We studied the artwork, oohed and aahed over the band members, and followed along with the song lyrics as we listened. It’s an experience my daughters missed out on when they were younger, although my daughter Laura does now have quite a large vinyl collection.    

But I digress. From a decluttering and minimalism point-of-view, the arrival of streaming services may mean one less thing to deal with for future generations. For this generation, though, many of us have a lot of media to declutter.

What is the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge?

In this year-long journey, we’re tackling one task at a time with the goal of cleaning up and organizing our homes. If you’ve just joined us, no worries. You can jump right in with this week’s challenge. Just check out the first two posts in the series to download your free checklists.

• 52-Week Decluttering Challenge
• Week 1 – Easy Decluttering Checklist

You can get easy access to all previous weekly posts on the main Decluttering page.

Are you ready for week 15? Let’s get decluttering!

Week 15 – Decluttering media – CDs, DVDs, Records, Cassettes

What I got rid of

Most of what I got rid of this week was kids’ media from when my girls were small. I also found several CDs that we had duplicates of. In total, I removed 45 items: 1 VHS tape, 14 CDs, 5 cassette tapes and 25 DVDs.

Let’s keep in touch! Join my mailing list and I’ll email you when I add a new post.

But I drew the line at my record collection

I read an article on minimalism the other day. It was one of those pieces about the “right way to do minimalism”. The article said having the space is not an excuse to keep something.

Now, I maintain that the right way to do anything is to find what works for you. You’ll be a lot more motivated if you do things your way instead of trying to follow someone else’s rules. And I guarantee you’ll be happier with the results.

With that in mind, I refuse to get rid of my record collection! During my first round of decluttering, I hadn’t owned a turntable in years, but I still have every album I bought when I was a teenager.

A couple of years ago my daughter Laura got a turntable. She brought it with her when she came home from college for Christmas. We went through my crates of albums. Oh! The memories! Just looking at the album covers took me back to a different time.

After I got a turntable for my birthday a few years ago, I moved my albums from crates in a closet in the basement to a shelf in my office bookcase. I’m looking forward to having more time to listen to them after I retire.

This week’s decluttering and organizing tips

Here are my tips and learnings from week 15.

• If you have a large media collection, it helps to organize it in alphabetical order. That saves time when you’re choosing a movie to watch, and it also reduces the chance you’ll end up with duplicates because you buy something you forgot you had.
• As I said above, with any decluttering exercise, do what works for you. If you have albums or DVDs that bring back happy memories of a different time, keep them! The purists will say that you don’t need the physical item to experience the memory. That may be true for some things but, sometimes, just physically holding something in your hand transports you back in time.

2024 Update

It has been three years so I’m rebooting the 52-Week Decluttering Challenge to see how much I can get rid of in 2024.

Even though I rarely watch or listen to them, I’m still not ready to part with most of my CDs and DVDs. I did find a few fitness DVDs to get rid of, along some of the CDs my daughters got at Vacation Bible School when they were small. The grand total was 12 items…but I can’t part with any of my LP records. My daughter Laura has told me she wants me to leave them to her in my will.

So that’s week 15 done.

If you have friends or family members who could benefit from a little less clutter in their lives, please share this post and spread the word!

Do you have a large media collection, or have you already decluttered this area? Tell us any tips you have for organizing and decluttering media below.