Popular music heritage, community archives and the challenge of sustainability

Abstract

This article identifies the challenges community archives of popular music face in achieving mediumto long-term sustainability. The artefacts and vernacular knowledge to be found in community archives, both physical and online, are at risk of being lost 'to the tip' and, consequently, to 'cultural memory', due to a lack of resources and technological change. The authors offer case studies of the British Archive of Country Music, a physical archive, and an online Facebook group Upstairs at the Mermaid, to exemplify how and why such groups must strategize their practices in order to remain sustainable. By including both online and physical community archiving in the scope of this research, the authors find that despite key differences in practice, both archival communities face similar threats of closure. The article concludes with an overview of the general outlook for community archives, and possible solutions to this ongoing issue of sustainable practices and processes for this sector.

New and Emerging Challenges to Heritage and Well-Being: A Critical Review

“…Heritage 2019, 2 1305 sustainability of heritage sites and practices is interlinked with understanding the role of heritage in promoting and securing the well-being of those people to whom the heritage has cultural meaning. Heritage sustainability is a particular challenge for unintentional heritage sites such as those found on social media platforms in which archival practices have emerged despite users not having the original Heritage sustainability is a particular challenge for unintentional heritage sites such as those found on social media platforms in which archival practices have emerged despite users not having the original intent to preserve or archive the materials they upload [54]. The challenge of sustainability can be observed in the case of the Myspace platform which was reported in early 2019 to have permanently deleted approximately 50 million songs by 14 million artists uploaded prior to 2015 due to an unsuccessful server migration.…”

“…The challenge of sustainability can be observed in the case of the Myspace platform which was reported in early 2019 to have permanently deleted approximately 50 million songs by 14 million artists uploaded prior to 2015 due to an unsuccessful server migration. The platform was never intended to be used as an online archive, and users of the platform are unlikely to "consider themselves to be archivists or involved in the act of archiving", but the deletion of materials acts to remove from public access items from popular music's past, "subsequently, taking it out of heritage's reach" [54] (p. 482). In the case of Myspace and other social media platforms, the threat to the sustainability of unintentional archives "is tied up with the commercial aims and objectives, terms and conditions, and the online architecture imposed by the corporation which dictates how communities are able to grow and sustain themselves and their collections" [54] (p. 480).…”

“…The platform was never intended to be used as an online archive, and users of the platform are unlikely to "consider themselves to be archivists or involved in the act of archiving", but the deletion of materials acts to remove from public access items from popular music's past, "subsequently, taking it out of heritage's reach" [54] (p. 482). In the case of Myspace and other social media platforms, the threat to the sustainability of unintentional archives "is tied up with the commercial aims and objectives, terms and conditions, and the online architecture imposed by the corporation which dictates how communities are able to grow and sustain themselves and their collections" [54] (p. 480). The impact on well-being is emerging through posts about the Myspace debacle that have appeared on another social media platform Reddit, with one user noting: "My son recorded a song when he was 7 years old that his guitar instructor uploaded to his Myspace page.…”

Recording studios as museums? Record producers’ perspectives on German rock studios and accounts of their heritage practice

“…The discussion of issues related to heritage and preservation has flourished in popular music studies in recent years. Respective studies have explored music museums and their challenges (Baker et al 2018;Leonard 2007Leonard , 2010Fairchild 2017), grassroots activism and online documentation of heritage objects (Bennett and Strong 2018;Kaun and Stiernstedt 2014), DIY music preservation (Baker and Huber 2013), community archives (Baker 2017;Flinn 2007) and 'heritage rock' (Bennett 2009). Such research has often focused on the authority of heritage and cultural preservation (Roberts and Cohen 2014), usually characterised by a tripartite split between (a) officially authorised institutions like state-funded museums, (b) commercial heritage industries and (c) the community that assembles material artefacts, often by less canonical artists, and exhibits them in self-authorised collections offline and online.…”

Queering the Community Music Archive

“…It is also worth reflecting on the point at which DIY practices of archiving may become institutions; that there is, for example in Roberts and Cohen's (2014) typology of popular music heritage, a variant of heritage practice that does not necessarily see itself as heritage practice, and might be constituted by personal collection or dissemination of materials (Baker 2015a). The work of Baker and Collins (2016) also highlights that the archiving of popular culture should be understood as a continuum of practice in which there is movement between the grassroots beginnings of an archive and, over time, the possibility of securing a level of legitimation or authorisation such that it emerges as a mainstream heritage institution. That is, none of the archives discussed in this article are fixed in place but rather move back and forth along a continuum based on access to resources (time, space, money, people) which ultimately determine the lifecycle of an archive (Flinn 2011).…”