Rather than start a brand new discussion, I thought I'd ask the classical aficionados here to garner their knowledge and educated guesses.
If I wanted to get recordings of every classical piece ever recorded (not written, but recorded) without duplicates (e.g. just one recording of Beethoven's 5th, one recording of Bach's cello suites), about how many CDs would it take? For simplicity, let's limit it to western classical music, from early music to contemporary. According to the Bach 333 project, it took 225 CDs to present every piece composed by Bach (but including some duplicate recordings of the same piece). If someone as prolific as Bach can be covered in ~200 CDs, I'd think that most can be covered in far less.
Would the average output of a composer be something like 50 CDs? How many classical music composers have there been who have had their music recorded? 10,000, 20,000, 50,000?
For the sake of agument, let's say 20,000; then 20,000 x 50CDs = 1,000,000.
Do you think 1,000,000 CDs would be enough to have a complete set of every piece of classical music ever recorded? Am I grossly underestimating or overestimating?
I apologize for intruding with a non-music post, but I've always been curious about this.
Also, does anyone have a link to a website that might have information related to questions like this?