It starts with the Dylan/Cash bootlegs, and that is in fact one of the original "white cover" bootlegs I recall arriving in Scotland in the 70s. For Edinburgh residents you knew you had one of the first shipment if it was covered in mud: the parcel of albums had been dumped close to a puddle by the record shop door. I can't remember if we called it "40 red white and blue shoe strings" or "Motorpsycho nightmare" but they are the two I recall. The double "joker" album had Dylan on piano doing 'I'll keep it with mine'
The great thing about the Nashville recording (as I recall it) is that it has Cash singing lead on some of the songs on "Nashville Skyline" and he sounds fantastic.
The only more obsessive tragics than Dylan bootleg owners, would be Grateful Dead recording owners.
This is a topic close to my heart. As I fight to restart Murfie, my goal is to make physical media ownership the basis for legal digital access that can't be taken away by the whims of copyright holders.
I truly believe in this solution, and I'm not giving up on it yet, even though it's taken a LOT longer than I ever thought it could... by several orders of magnitude...
Ew gross. I'm suprised that ever survived. I did a little cleanup, it's hardly good, but it's not as bad
Edit: Aside from just fixing the formatting and such, I've looked into the company, and it's a fascinating story. I might add content to the page in the future!
Just went on a deep dive into Murfie, and I want to ask if your ok? The whole situation seems genuinely miserable, I don't know if I'd be able to stand it. Your dedication is incredible
Thanks, it's been incredibly frustrating dealing with this place. Pine Bluff is one of, if not the most crime ridden, corrupt town in the US. Some of the things they do just seem unreal, but there's a sort of learned helplessness going on. I didn't grow up here so the corruption rubs me the wrong way. I've had a lot of problems because I'm annoyed enough by the blatant thievery that I can't keep my mouth shut.
Another "persecuted preservationist" worth mentioning is Bob Monkhouse [1], and then of course there's Marion Stokes [2], who luckily didn't face any legal issues AFAIK
That's incredible about Bob Monkhouse, especially his leftover collection. What a shame about all the other items that were seized and seemingly destroyed.
Respected, but I really hate private trackers. They do nothing for preservation because all of the torrents on there are not only hidden from 90% of people who would want them, but also it's all gone once the site shuts down (see rarbg.to for the opposite effect). Learned enough Russian to navigate rutracker.org and the sheer amount of good music on there that's frequently updated and seeded is astounding to how much of a barren wasteland TPB and 1337x is for things like that.
I feel there will always be a difficult interplay between public and private. Public sites encourage wide sharing and dissemination, at the expense of curation and longevity. Private sites (whether peer-to-peer or scene) can impose top-down strictures to encourage uploading and retention and a certain quality standard, at the cost of widespread availability.
But these synergise—we all know that scene and P2P film releases percolate from private sites to public ones, for instance. Torrents may die in the public sphere before being reseeded from an obscure, yet shielded and resilient, private archive (I have done this). The economies of private sites encourage the contribution of new content, which after a requisite delay is disseminated outwards to the public sphere. Light is the left hand of darkness, darkness the right hand of light. (The same model applies among private sites too as content is cross-uploaded, building resilience in the shadow archive. When one private or public site shuts down, that content doesn’t all have to disappear.)
I would actually argue that where public materials are less available, it’s less because of the private sites (which will always exist) being private and more because there are no public sites for that media type to be mirrored to. Think Libgen, which absorbs almost all contributions to private book sites eventually. Music enjoyers aren’t so lucky usually, which I think is because of the language gap between the major public music site that you mentioned and private music sites which are predominantly English-language.
I really worry that we've entered another dark age of software preservation with cryptographic DRM becoming ubiquitous in the last ~15+ years.
Many of my formative years were spent browsing the brand new App Store for hours and hours, trying out cool new apps. It was just so exciting then, cool new stuff was coming out all the time, and I have a lot of fond memories from that time. I'm aware that there are archives of some portion of unencrypted .IPA packages from back then, but what about young people today? Will they be able to relive their digital youth in 10-15 years time? Seems clear to me that everything available now will be locked up, and the keys archived on some server in Cupertino, never to be released to the world for legal reasons. And setting aside malicious encryption, there are also all the the apps and digital experiences that depend on servers with a finite lifetime, and these are also becoming more and more common.
Am I of the last generation that can relive that portion of my digital life in an emulator? It seems like we've already lost so much, and it's only getting worse.
(N=1) I have a general feeling that the next generation is more consumerist due to this lack of permanence in the tools they grew up with. Live in the vibrant present because the past is inaccessible and the future is too difficult to think about.
A world where kids can retreat into the comforts of the past doesn't exist as an option, and they can only turn to the enshittified analogs of the present, with the knowledge that they won't exist in the future. It's a generation forced to be existentially apathetic to anything other than the now.
This is a fascinating theory/perspective, and it makes sense, though reading it I've felt an itch in the back of my mind: What about photography? We now have the fortune of having a camera with us everywhere. My parents derive great enjoyment from showing their childhood photos, and I must imagine this phenomenon will continue – though maybe it won't? Conversely, the accessibility of photography lends itself to potential over-utilization and hence devaluation. This year alone, I'm nearing 2000 photos taken. In 20 years, how will I pick out the ones that matter? Before, photography was for the special things, now it's for everything. Even though my parents have smartphones, they still have this mentality of photos as a precious resource. My dad has taken less than 200 in the whole lifetime of his phone. This just doesn't exist anymore.
Sorry if this wasn't coherent, you just got my mind turning and I started spitballing! Thank you.
Ok, but it’s that or hand-curate thousands of photos per year. That option’s still there, but what’s actually happening is most folks let the computer figure it out.
I would agree. I'm 15 and I usually spend my time away from the culture, news and technology of today. I don't even know how to use Spotify, never owned Bluetooth headphones, don't plan on dropping Windows XP on 2 of my laptops anytime soon, and use Winamp. I didn't even know Apple was making a VR headset until yesterday and I had to ask what a Thunderbolt port was.
I don't like making this the typical "oh im so unique my generation is stupid" but everything from my past is fading away into obsolescence and the things I like are so dumb now. Games are getting way shittier, barely anyone makes a finished game with a standard bonus multiplayer coop/deathmatch anymore, now every game is a fucking live service e-sport that's free to download and expensive to actually get good items in. Technology is driven by surveillance capitalism and whatever fad this week catches on with the false promises pushed by AI bros and crypto bros, hardware is getting less open and harder to repair. Thank god I was raised with a homemade PC built out of the crappiest parts imaginable because it taught me a lot. Countless hours of trying W7, W10, random Linux distros, overclocking, figuring out why it won't post, upgrading things, maxing out the DDR3 RAM, plugging in a fan found in the basement only for the cable to start pouring smoke, exploding a hard drive after playing TF2 one Friday night for like 3 hours because I bought 5 MvM tickets.
Maybe I'm just some edgy kid going on about how woe is me and the world sucks but it seems to me things are getting harder to enjoy in the world.
A world in which it’s easy and cheap (or even possible!) to enjoy lots of media of the past is itself a very new thing. Within living memory, hearing a song on-demand meant being or knowing someone who could play an instrument. Those family sing-alongs around the piano that you see in older movies and shows, tapering off (but still sometimes appearing!) in the 80s, are an artifact of that time.
Seeing some kind of performance, or a film, at home, was even harder until pretty recently.
Things like acting in community theater or being able to play an instrument or having other kinds of small-time artistic talent used to be a lot more socially valuable.
The great thing about the Nashville recording (as I recall it) is that it has Cash singing lead on some of the songs on "Nashville Skyline" and he sounds fantastic.
The only more obsessive tragics than Dylan bootleg owners, would be Grateful Dead recording owners.