DIGITAL ARCHIVIST

Since 2003, we’ve been traveling through time to rediscover and share the legacy of MTV’s 120 Minutes, the classic U.S. TV series that exposed a vast collection of alternative music videos, artist interviews, and live performances to a diverse range of music enthusiasts across several generations.

This project captures and revisits the memories of 27 years of Music Television—this is the soundtrack of our lives.

With hundreds of volunteer contributors like you, we assembled this incredible archive from scratch, rebuilding nearly the entire history of 120 Minutes. Inside, you’ll find the playlists and music videos for 1,005 episodes, spanning across the various iterations of 120 Minutes on both MTV and MTV2 from 1986 to 2013, as well as Subterranean, its successor from 2003 to 2011.

Contains more than 2,000 defined entries based primarily on archival literature in the United States and Canada. Search here

From Reverb, Published Apr 18, 2018 by Joel Handley

Britain’s national radio station has shared a huge cache of sound files from its archives—16,000 recordings from across the world and throughout its 90-year history of broadcasting.

Download the full collection of 16,000+ sound effects from the BBC archives  Download via BBC or here

As you may imagine from a station that began near the end of Britain’s imperial era and continued to aspire to global news coverage, there is a huge diversity in the sound files.

The collection includes audio clips such as “South American parrot talking and screeching” and “Morocco: Marrakesh, market square with music & distant traffic,” as well as charming local fare like various “Westminster Abbey bells” and “1 lorry passing slowly.” The set also includes sound effects created in the BBC studios for radio plays and other programs.

While the files retain their copyrights by the BBC, they are available for free to download and use for all “personal, educational, or research purposes,” and can be requested (and presumably licensed) for commercial use.

Check out all of the sound files for yourself here. And if you find any good snare hits, let us know in the comments.

Lets You Hear Trances, Paranormal Music, Glossolalia & Other Strange Sounds (1905-2007)

We’ve all had our wits scared out of us by films, images, and the written word, but somehow few forms work their haunting magic quite so effectively as sound alone. Think of the snap of the twig in the woods or the creak of the staircase in the empty house — or, to take it farther, the sound of possessed children speaking in tongues. You can hear recordings of that and other unusual phenomena at Ubuweb, which hosts the collection Occult Voices – Paranormal Music, Recordings of Unseen Intelligences 1905-2007.

Read more here

SPIN
August 4, 2017

CREDIT: Kevork Djansezian/Getty

This morning, Neil Young officially announced the impending release of Hitchhiker, a solo acoustic album he recorded in 1976 but decided against putting out at the time. As Pitchfork notes, he also announced an upcoming online archival project that will include all of Young’s music released between 1963, when he cut his first single, and the present.

Young touted the new archive in a note posted on his website, which you can read in full here. According to the note, the archive will include an interactive timeline of Young’s vast discography, with “credits, memorabilia, films or videos, press and photographs” associated with each release. There’s also an intriguing mention of “unreleased albums,” a potential reference to several records that, like Hitchhiker, Young recorded but never made available to listeners.

Young is a longtime advocate for high-fidelity audio, and the archive will also make his entire catalog available for streaming via Xstream, his new proprietary streaming service. (No word on whether this will change the status of Young’s music on traditional streaming services like Spotify, where it was restored after a lengthy absence last fall.) There’s no specific date for when the archive will launch, but Young’s website claims it will be “opening soon.)

Hypebot.com
By Bill Wilson, VP Digital Strategy & Business Development
NARM and digitalmusic.org
April 25, 2013

Metadata. It’s a jargon-y word that probably turns a lot of artists off at the mere mention of it. It’s also one of the main things standing between them and a variety of new opportunities to make money. And those new opportunities are becoming increasingly important for cash-strapped musicians.

As time marches on, today’s artists are finding that sales of their recordings are making up less of their overall revenue picture. Of course, recordings will always be crucial to musicians for a variety of reasons, but as that slice of the revenue pie gets smaller, what are artists to do to make up the loss?

The good news is that most musicians have hosts of revenue-generating assets they don’t even know about, but they require proper metadata to thrive. For example, as we shift from a unit-based (download) music economy to an attention-based (subscription) one, artist revenue will depend more and more on long-term engagement as opposed to a one-time sale. That means photos, videos, and news items will become highly monetizable products and services.

But to take full advantage of alternative revenue streams such as these, it’s extremely important that today’s artists understand how to develop and maintain their long-term digital archive, from what information it must contain to how it should be structured. It’s one of the topics we’ll be covering at digitalmusic.org’s first Music Industry Metadata Summit on May 6-7 during Music Biz 2013. But for those eager to get started right away, here are a few pointers:

Studio Credits and Liner Notes

Who played on your recorded tracks? What was the engineer’s name? The producer? What are their email addresses? What was the name of the studio you used? Collecting this information may seem like drudgery when you’re in the middle of the creative process, but these credits are the breadcrumbs of discovery. Keep a simple Google spreadsheet of ALL of this information. You’ll regret not having it in the future.

Images and Videos

With massive amounts of posters, logos, and photos being taken of artists by both fans and professionals, it’s important that musicians maintain an archive of these images (and videos) that contains not only the photographer’s name but also the date each picture or video was taken and the usage permissions for each one. Artists should also make sure to fill out the “tags” (metadata) for image location and any other info that future fans may want to search by.

Remember, other people’s images are their property. Although they can’t sell them without the artist’s permission, artists can’t do the reverse either. Therefore, musicians must prepare themselves by downloading the highest-res versions of each image to a hard drive, knowing the photographer and their contact info, and being aware of the usage rights.

News

Artists can gain a wealth of historical information that can be collected and re-deployed (or even sold) in the future by simply subscribing to RSS feeds for their own social media accounts. It’s a huge return for practically zero investment and something every artist can do right now.

This is just a small sampling of the ways that metadata can help artists prepare for the future and increase their income. However, if they continue to tune out every time the concept comes up, they’ll be missing out on all of these new opportunities. Maintaining a proper digital archive is not difficult to do if you’re willing to make it a priority, and as we move forward, musicians will have more and more reasons to do so.

(I want this job!)

The Atlantic
JUN 29 2012, 4:27 PM ET 10

Now everyone can be that crazed Dead fan you once knew in college.

No band deserves an online archive more than the Grateful Dead. As much lifestyle as musical outfit, the Dead influenced millions through their concerts and songs. A few years ago, the band selected the University of California Santa Cruz as the host for its history, and now the first fruits of that decision are available for consumption. The Grateful Dead Online Archive is now live.

The expansive archive has a map of hundreds and hundreds of shows, thousands of photographs and show posters, and — in keeping with the band’s community orientation — tons of fan art.
Even as a very weak Dead fan, this is an impressive monument to one of the banner carriers of 20th century counterculture.

As a sidenote, I’m left wondering what it’s like to be a kid developing her music taste these days. I had a friend in high school who compulsively traded Dead show tapes with people across the country in the early days of the Internet. He loved scoring that ultrarare tape almost no one had ever heard. Now, if you were that same kid, you have the whole culture of the Dead just waiting for you on this one website. It’s amazing, but I wonder if it takes something out of fandom if it’s a little too easy to access. You want to have to work for the knowledge that the best Dead show ever was on May 8, 1977 at Barton Hall on Cornell’s campus.