Category Archives: Live Music Archive

Internet Archive Services Update: 2024-10-17

[Washinton Post piece]

Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. 

The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.

The Wayback Machine, Archive-It, scanning, and national library crawls have resumed, as well as email, blog, helpdesk, and social media communications.  Our team is working around the clock across time zones to bring other services back online. In coming days more services will resume, some starting in read-only mode as full restoration will take more time. 

We’re taking a cautious, deliberate approach to rebuild and strengthen our defenses. Our priority is ensuring the Internet Archive comes online stronger and more secure.

As a library community, we are seeing other cyber attacks—for instance the British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library, and now Calgary Public Library. We hope these attacks are not indicative of a trend.

For the latest updates, please check this blog and our official social media accounts: X/Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon.

Thank you for your patience and ongoing support.

Coming this October: The Vanishing Culture Report

This October, we are publishing The Vanishing Culture Report, a new open access report examining the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. 

As more content is created digitally and provided to individuals and memory institutions through temporary licensing deals rather than ownership, materials such as sound recordings, books, television shows, and films are at constant risk of being removed from streaming platforms. This means they are vanishing from our culture without ever being archived or preserved by libraries.

But the threat of vanishing is not exclusive to digital content. As time marches on, analog materials on obsolete formats—VHS tapes, 78rpm recordings, floppy disks—are deteriorating and require urgent attention to ensure their survival. Without proper archiving, digitization, and access, the cultural artifacts stored in these formats are in danger of being lost forever.

By highlighting the importance of ownership and preservation in the digital age, The Vanishing Culture Report aims to inform individuals, institutions, and policymakers about the breadth and scale of cultural loss thus far, and inspire them to take proactive steps in ensuring that our cultural record remains accessible for future generations.

Share Your Story!

As part of the Vanishing Culture report, we’d like to hear from you. We invite you to share your stories about why preservation is important for the media you use on our site. Whether it’s a website crawl in the Wayback Machine, a rare book that shaped your perspective, a vintage film that captured your imagination, or a collection that you revisit often, we want to know why preserving these items is important to you. Share your story now!

Live Music Archive Collection Now Tops 250,000 Recordings

For fans wanting to relive an epic concert or discover upcoming bands, there are now more than 250,000 recordings in the Live Music Archive to enjoy. 

The collection has steadily grown over the past 20 years as a collaborative effort between Internet Archive staff and dedicated, music-loving volunteers. At a pace of uploading nearly 30 items a day, the Live Music Archive reached the one-quarter million recording mark in June, and now takes up more than 250 terabytes of data on Internet Archive servers.

“It’s a huge victory for the open web,” said founder of the Internet Archive Brewster Kahle, about the Live Music Archive, which he describes as “fantastically popular” with the public. “Fans have helped build it. Bands have supported it. And the Internet Archive has continued to scale it to be able to meet the demand.”

For years, concert-goers recorded and traded tapes, but in 2002, the Internet Archive offered a reliable infrastructure to preserve performances files. Partnering with the etree music community, the Live Music Archive was established to provide ongoing, free access to lossless and MP3-encoded audio recordings. 

(For more on its history, see https://blog.archive.org/2022/08/12/celebrating-20-years-of-the-live-music-archive/.)

“It shouldn’t cost to give something away,” said Kahle, lamenting fees that can be charged to host items online. “We wanted to make it possible for people to make things permanently available without having to sell their souls to a platform that is going to exploit it for advertising. That just seemed like the world that should exist, and we thought we could play a role.”

Since its launch two decades ago, more than 8,000 artists have given permission to have recordings of their shows archived on the Live Music Archive, and users from around the world have listened to files more than 600 million times. The collection includes the iconic Grateful Dead, as well as aspiring musicians trying to garner attention from the free outlet that spans jambands, folk singers, bluegrass, rock, pop, jazz, classical and experimental music.

The 250,000th item was a Dead and Company show from June 18, 2023.

In 2002, Jonathan Aizen, a technology entrepreneur who helped build the Live Music Archive, said having a free, non-profit, forever host for concert recordings was embraced by music fans. “Until working with the Internet Archive, there were no coordinated and reliable means to preserve and distribute the recordings,” Aizen said. “The only way that these things were being preserved was by copying them — and that was very haphazard, so the music community was very excited.”

Over time, Aizen said it’s been impressive just how many artists have allowed their concerts to be recorded and the organic way the Live Music Archive has grown. “When we started, I had no sense it would last two decades,” he said. “I think it’s really compelling that these recordings are being preserved for posterity. I also didn’t expect the breadth of artists. It’s fair to say that it’s exceeded my expectations by quite a bit.”

In addition to being a resource for fans, the Live Music Archive has been a way for musicians to be discovered. “There’s no doubt in my mind that the accessibility of the recordings on the Internet Archive is exposing bands and drawing people in who then go to the show,” he said. Devoted listeners can track the progress of a band’s career and follow the way songs are played differently on different nights, noting the improvisational element of live recordings, Aizen added.

The passion of the volunteers to curate the collection has been at the heart of the Live Music Archive and is a testament to the strength of the live music community supporting bands. 

David Mallick began uploading to the Live Music Archive in the early days and then came on board as a volunteer curator for about 10 years. He helped recruit bands to participate and helped troubleshoot recordings that others had uploaded. Mallick said free unlimited bandwidth and storage is appealing to musicians, especially for smaller bands just getting started and those who don’t mind sharing their unvarnished recordings. 

“It’s a ‘no ego’ project for the band,” Mallick said. “These are bands that are comfortable enough with their live performances to just say ‘Yeah, put up whatever’ – even if they flubbed a note, screwed up a song, or a fan grabbed a mic.”

Every time Mallick added a recording to the Live Music Archive, he said it was rewarding to know it would always be there for others to hear. “It’s so well organized. Archivists are hosting it, making it uniform, searchable and easy to find things,” he said. 

Added Aizen: “Music is universal — it’s cross cultural and across time,” Aizen said. “To be able to create access, in a world where everything is so commercialized, and just having music be freely accessible, with no ads — that is also something that’s really just special.”

2022 Empowering Libraries Year in Review

The Internet Archive launched the Empowering Libraries campaign in 2020 to defend equal access to library services for all. Since then, threats to libraries have only grown, so our fight continues. As 2022 draws to a close, here’s a look back through some of our library’s milestones and accomplishments over the year.

In the news

  • When the war in Ukraine started, volunteers began using the Wayback Machine and other online tools to preserve Ukrainian websites and digital collections. The effort, Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO), now has more than 1,500 volunteers working to preserve more than 5,000 web sites and 50TB of data. 
    • Watch a compelling story about SUCHO from CBS News featuring Quinn Dombrowski, one of the project leaders from Stanford University, and Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine.
    • In May, we partnered with Better World Books on a book drive supporting Ukrainian scholars. BWB customers were able to donate $1 at checkout to acquire books cited in the Ukrainian-language Wikipedia for the Internet Archive to preserve, digitize, and link to citations in Wikipedia.
  • In October, we introduced Democracy’s Library, a free, open, online compendium of government research and publications from around the world. We hosted an in-person celebration that highlighted the critical importance of free and open access to government publications, and have continued framing out what Democracy’s Library is and why it’s necessary.
  • Internet Archive Canada opened its new headquarters in Vancouver, BC, alongside the Association of Canadian Archivists 2022 Conference.
  • More than 1,000 authors have spoken out on behalf of libraries, demanding that publishers and trade associations put the digital rights of librarians, readers, and authors ahead of shareholder profits. 
  • In a tumultuous year on social media, Internet Archive has added a Mastodon server. Why? We need a game with many winners, not just a few powerful players.
  • In an OpEd for TIME, Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, warned, “the instability occasioned by Twitter’s change in ownership has revealed an underlying instability in our digital information ecosystem.”

The internet reacts to the lawsuit against our library

  • On July 7, 2022, the Internet Archive filed a motion for summary judgment, asking a federal judge to rule in our favor and end a radical lawsuit, filed by four major publishing companies, that aims to criminalize library lending. Check out the Hachette v. Internet Archive page at EFF for all filings and resources.
  • We hosted a press conference on July 8 about the lawsuit featuring statements from Brewster Kahle (Internet Archive) and Corynne McSherry (EFF), plus powerful impact statements from medical school librarian Benjamin Saracco and author and editor Tom Scocca.
  • Interest in the lawsuit crossed over into mainstream channels following a viral tweet about the filing, which kicked off a lengthy online conversation about library rights, digital lending and digital ownership.
  • After a series of standard filings across the summer and early fall, on October 8, Internet Archive filed the final brief in support of our motion for summary judgment, asking the Court to dismiss the lawsuit because our lending program is a fair use.
  • What does the lawsuit mean for the future of libraries? Internet Archive’s policy counsel, Peter Routhier, considers how the publishers view libraries based on their filings.
  • Check out the Hachette v. Internet Archive page at EFF for all filings and resources.
  • One message really resonated online—people were surprised to learn that the Internet Archive has a physical archive that preserves all the physical books we’ve acquired and digitized. 

eBooks, #OwnBooks & digital ownership

  • 2022 might go down as the year that people started to really understand what it means when libraries & individuals can no longer own content, like when streaming-only content vanishes from media platforms.
  • Musician Max Collins wrote in Popula how “owning media is now an act of countercultural defiance,” walking readers through his first-hand example of how the streaming model doesn’t work for artists, only corporations.
  • Brewster Kahle published, “Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books,” countering the notion put forward by publishers that ebooks don’t wear out. In fact, Brewster notes that ebooks require “constant maintenance—reprocessing, reformatting, re-invigorating or they will not be readable or read.”
  • Brewster’s post sparked the interest of LA Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik, who expanded on the issues around digital ownership in “Here’s why you can’t ‘own’ your ebooks.”
  • To celebrate why it’s important to own books, and to help bring visibility to issues around digital ownership, we launched the participatory #OwnBooks campaign, which invited people to share photos with the oldest book, or most treasured volume, from their personal collection, like this signed copy of The Phantom Tollbooth.
  • Author Glyn Moody published his latest book, Walled Culture, as a free ebook that you can download and own, or as a physical book that you can purchase in print.
  • More publishers joined the movement to sell—not license—ebooks to libraries, including independent publisher 11:11 Press.

The future of libraries

  • In February, we launched Library as Laboratory, a new series exploring the computational use of Internet Archive collections. The series included segments from digital humanities scholars, computational scientists, web archiving professionals and other researchers.
  • To help librarians and other information professionals better understand the decentralized web, Internet Archive partnered with the Metropolitan New York Library Council, DWeb, and Library Futures for a six-part series, Imagining a Better Online World: Exploring the Decentralized Web
  • During this year’s National Library Week, we invited readers to Meet the Librarians who work at the Internet Archive, highlighting the new roles our librarians lead in support of our mission, “Universal Access to All Knowledge.”
  • Internet Archive joined with Creative Commons, Wikimedia Foundation and others in the Movement for a Better Internet, a collaborative effort to ensure that the internet’s evolution is guided by public interest values.
  • Lila Bailey, Internet Archive’s senior policy fellow, and Michael Menna, policy fellow from Stanford University, released their report,”Securing Digital Rights for Libraries: Towards an Affirmative Policy Agenda for a Better Internet,” regarding libraries’ role in shaping the next iteration of the internet

Milestones

  • Dave Hansen, one of the authors of the white paper on controlled digital lending, was named the new executive director of Authors Alliance.
  • Carl Malamud received this year’s Internet Archive Hero Award for his lifelong mission to make public information freely available to the public.
  • We hosted the first in-person Library Leaders Forum in three years, preceded by a virtual Forum that brought together hundreds of digital library enthusiasts to explore issues related to digital ownership and the future of library collections.
  • We hosted a joint webinar with OCLC about our resource sharing pilots, including how to request articles from the Internet Archive via interlibrary loan.
  • The Music Library Association made its publications openly available at Internet Archive.
  • We began gathering content to support the newly announced Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC), and then quickly surpassed 25,000 items in the collection.
  • DISCMASTER, a new software tool, allows users to search across the contents of the tens of thousands of archived CD-ROMs at the Internet Archive.
  • In August we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Live Music Archive with a historical tour of the effort, which has resulted in hundreds of thousands of live sets available for listening at archive.org.

Donations

  • Colgate University donated more than 1.5 million microfiche cards for preservation and digitization, covering topics including Census data, documents from the Department of Education, Congressional testimony, CIA documents, and foreign news translated into English.
  • Facing an uncertain future, Hong Kong bookstore owner Albert Wan closed his pro-democracy, independent bookstore and donated the books to the Internet Archive for preservation and digitization.
  • Do you have physical collections you’d like to donate to the Internet Archive? Check out our help document.

Book talks

New additions to the Internet Archive for July 2022

Many items are added to the Internet Archive’s collections every month, by us and by our patrons. Here’s a round up of some of the new media you might want to check out. Logging in might be required to borrow certain items. 

Notable new collections from our patrons: 

Books – 78,091 New items in July

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

Audio Archive – 91,636 New Items in July

The audio archive contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Explore.

LibriVox Audiobooks – 119 New Items in July

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages. Explore.

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings – 8,888 New Items in July

Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century. Explore.

Live Music Archive – 965 New Items in July

The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format, along with the convenience of on-demand streaming (all with artist permission). Explore.

Movies – 135 New Items in July

Watch feature films, classic shorts, documentaries, propaganda, movie trailers, and more! Explore.

New additions to the Internet Archive for May 2022

Many items are added to the Internet Archive’s collections every month, by us and by our patrons. Here’s a round up of some of the new media you might want to check out. Logging in might be required to borrow certain items. 

Notable new collections from our patrons: 

Books – 52,300 New items in May

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

Audio Archive – 89,325 New Items in May

The audio archive contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Explore.

LibriVox Audiobooks – 92 New Items in May

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages. Explore.

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings – 112 New Items in May

Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century. Explore.

Live Music Archive – 807 New Items in May

The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format, along with the convenience of on-demand streaming (all with artist permission). Explore.

Netlabels223 New Items in May

This collection hosts complete, freely downloadable/streamable, often Creative Commons-licensed catalogs of ‘virtual record labels’. These ‘netlabels’ are non-profit, community-built entities dedicated to providing high quality, non-commercial, freely distributable MP3/OGG-format music for online download in a multitude of genres. Explore.

Movies – 110 New Items in May

Watch feature films, classic shorts, documentaries, propaganda, movie trailers, and more! Explore.

New additions to the Internet Archive for April 2022

Many items are added to the Internet Archive’s collections every month, by us and by our patrons. Here’s a round up of some of the new media you might want to check out. Logging in might be required to borrow certain items. 

Notable new collections from our patrons: 

  • Chris Cromwell Rare Reel to Reel Tapes – Rare and recovered reel-to-reel tapes from a variety of sources and preserved by Chris Cromwell. 
  • 1940s Classic TV – Television from the 1940s.
  • Game Shows Archive – A collection of game shows throughout television history, involving chance, skill and luck, usually presided over by a host and providing in-show commercials.
  • Dutch Television – Television programs and videos in the Dutch language, or from the Netherlands.

Books – 50,109 New items in April

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

Audio Archive – 150,224 New Items in April

The audio archive contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Explore.

LibriVox Audiobooks – 99 New Items in April

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages. Explore.

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings – 6,745 New Items in April

Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century. Explore.

Live Music Archive – 909 New Items in April

The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format, along with the convenience of on-demand streaming (all with artist permission). Explore.

Netlabels111 New Items in April

This collection hosts complete, freely downloadable/streamable, often Creative Commons-licensed catalogs of ‘virtual record labels’. These ‘netlabels’ are non-profit, community-built entities dedicated to providing high quality, non-commercial, freely distributable MP3/OGG-format music for online download in a multitude of genres. Explore.

Movies – 55 New Items in April

Watch feature films, classic shorts, documentaries, propaganda, movie trailers, and more! Explore.

New additions to the Internet Archive for March 2022

Many items are added to the Internet Archive’s collections every month, by us and by our patrons. Here’s a round up of some of the new media you might want to check out. Logging in might be required to borrow certain items. 

Notable new collections from our patrons: 

Books – 60,379 New items in March

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

Audio Archive – 93,954 New Items in March

The audio archive contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Explore.

LibriVox Audiobooks – 122 New Items in March

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages. Explore.

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings – 7,423 New Items in March

Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century. Explore.

Live Music Archive – 1,098 New Items in March

The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format, along with the convenience of on-demand streaming (all with artist permission). Explore.

Netlabels186 New Items in March

This collection hosts complete, freely downloadable/streamable, often Creative Commons-licensed catalogs of ‘virtual record labels’. These ‘netlabels’ are non-profit, community-built entities dedicated to providing high quality, non-commercial, freely distributable MP3/OGG-format music for online download in a multitude of genres. Explore.

Movies – 25 New Items in March

Watch feature films, classic shorts, documentaries, propaganda, movie trailers, and more! Explore.

What’s New in February 2022

Here are some of the notable new additions to the Internet Archive from February 2022. (Logging in might be required to borrow certain items.)

Notable new collections: 

We’ve been reorganizing some of the items uploaded by our users, and these collections of magazines struck us as particularly interesting:

Books 45,073

This month we’ve added books in more than 20 languages. Here are a few good ones to start with:

Audio Archive 73,305

The audio archive contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users.

The LibriVox Free Audiobook Collection 118

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audio versions of public domain texts: poetry, short stories, whole books, even dramatic works, in many different languages.

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings 8,840

Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century.

Live Music Archive 892

The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format, along with the convenience of on-demand streaming.

Netlabels 263

The Netlabels collection hosts complete, freely downloadable/streamable, often Creative Commons-licensed catalogs of virtual record labels.

Internet Arcade 5

The Internet Arcade is a web-based library of arcade (coin-operated) video games from the 1970s through to the 1990s, emulated in JSMAME, part of the JSMESS software package. Containing hundreds of games ranging through many different genres and styles, the Arcade provides research, comparison, and entertainment in the realm of the Video Game Arcade.

New additions to the Internet Archive for January 2022

Many items are added to the Internet Archive’s collections every month, by us and by our patrons. Here’s a round up of some of the new media you might want to check out. Logging in might be required to  borrow certain items. 

Notable new collections: 

Books 40,695

This month we’ve added books on varied subjects in more than 20 languages. Click through to explore, but here are a few interesting items to start with:

Audio Archive 79,099

The audio archive contains recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users.

The LibriVox Free Audiobook Collection 98

Founded in 2005, Librivox is a community of volunteers from all over the world who record audiobooks of public domain texts in many different languages.

 

78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings 6,849

The Great 78 Project! Listen to this collection of 78rpm records, cylinder recordings, and other recordings from the early 20th century.

Live Music Archive 799

The Live Music Archive is a community committed to providing the highest quality live concerts in a lossless, downloadable format, along with the convenience of on-demand streaming (all with artist permission).

Netlabels 486

This collection hosts complete, freely downloadable/streamable, often Creative Commons-licensed catalogs of ‘virtual record labels’. These ‘netlabels’ are non-profit, community-built entities dedicated to providing high quality, non-commercial, freely distributable MP3/OGG-format music for online download in a multitude of genres.