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Comment by wishinghand | Hacker News Reader

This reminded me of Purevolume.com, which I just went to go check. Seems like it's a clickbait pop culture article site now. It used to be Soundcloud before Soundcloud, though it was mostly popular with punk, hardcore, and their various offshoots. All of that uploaded music...just gone.

It's not necessarily sites going out of business/losing data either. On Bandcamp, Melora Creager used to have three songs up called The Willow Tree Tryptych. I bought it but it's no longer available for download in my account, though it's listed there. I'll have to pirate it somewhere since I don't seem to have a download of it. I'll have to figure out that later since Spotify atrophied my pirating knowledge.

Always archive your digital purchases when you can.

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mp3.com[1] predated Soundcloud by a decade, and was amazing both for listeners and for independent artists. They were paying artists royalties per-download/stream in 1999. The site shut down in 2003 and all the music was lost.[2] I still have music I downloaded from mp3.com that I have not been able to find anywhere else. This is why I still use and support P2P file sharing. After the 2003 experience with mp3.com it was obvious to me that using music streaming services was a bad idea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3.com#History

[2] There was some kind of deal with Trusonic/GarageBand.com where artists were able to access their tracks uploaded to mp3.com and transfer them to GarageBand.com for about a year from 2004 to 2005. It is unclear how many people actually did the transfer (I had an mp3.com page for an electronic music project and was never notified about this). GarageBand.com in turn closed down in 2010, offering migration to iLike. iLike was acquired by MySpace and rolled into MySpace Music in 2012.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GarageBand.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILike

I miss mp3.com and still have a few favourite mp3s by other people saved on a hard disk somewhere (or so I thought - doesn't seem to be on this hard disk so I'll have to check for them tonight).

I wish I'd archived the band bios too, because now they're completely out of context, just some band names and song titles which aren't Googleable in anyway. If any of the bios listed the musicians' names it'd be interesting to see what they're up to now, 20 years later.

(Ouch, that really was 20 years ago.)

I've got probably a few thousand mp3s from there and other services (lots of eMusic samplers) that now have little to no context. Sorting through them lately, it's a tad depressing when I hear a really great song and can find almost no information about the band that made it.

Also heavily used drip.fm. When Kickstarter decided to change the service to Patreon-lite I asked about archiving the site because of all of the extra info (forget about the music, I wanted the metadata). They told me they couldn't do it.

I used to publish to mp3.com, and sadly I don't even have backups of some of my songs I put on there.

I never made any money from mp3.com, but I do have a couple backpacks that they sent me for no real reason--a glorious reminder of the dotcom era.

Soundcloud also seems to have a bit rot problem. https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1102668648630681600

P.S. https://archive.org/donate

What happens to all the archived content when archive.org itself is gone?

Though a laudable effort, it seems as much a single point of failure as any other site.

In some sense it’s worse since it expensive and complex to run, and there’s also no way to know what’s actually valuable data vs data that has the value of an 80s informercial.

Definitely true. But the article mentioned donating to the Archive without providing a link to do it.

archive.org apparently has torrents of some of its content too:

https://blog.archive.org/2012/08/07/over-1000000-torrents-of...

so they're not completely centralised but may actually be trying to decentralise things a bit.

I'd be more worried about the copyrighted material that they can archive but aren't allowed to distribute.

I think it is easier to get continuous funding for it, because of the extra gravitas that comes from being an archive. Much like with libraries, the appeal of the idea itself is more important than the books inside. If you look at the list of their sponsors, they include e.g. the National Science Foundation and the Library of Congress.

That, and with more diverse stuff in one place, there's also more diverse interest in keeping it going.

Well, it's on Archive Team's watchlist:

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Alive..._OR_ARE_...

There are two mirrors:

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Internet_Archive

I guess there is something to using a file system like ZFS?

Purevolume shut down almost a year ago [1]. I was in high school during its heyday (and the earlier side of the years MySpace just lost). Those were formative years for my generation, and I have so many fond memories on both of those sites. It's so, so depressing that all of that stuff is just gone from the world.

[1] http://www.brooklynvegan.com/purevolume-shutting-down/

Found out about this last night. I wish I knew about Pirevolume shutting down. So much local music and dumb things my friends and I wrote gone.

You can email support and they will find the purchase. Or if you can dig up the email from the purchase, the download links should still work.

I've noticed some artists marking certain releases on Bandcamp as 'private' they're all at the bottom of my collection - usually if the record is picked up by a larger label, did that artist delete them or mark them private?

> Always archive your digital purchases when you can.

Absolutely, otherwise you might as well just be renting.

Also worth noting for this to be an option, you can’t purchase DRMed media. What good is your backup if you can’t decode, authenticate or play your own media?

If you are looking for super obscure stuff then soulseek is the place to check. If you are looking for less obscure stuff but want the maximum quality then redacted is the place.

Is that a literal site called redacted or did you redact it?

A quick search leads me to believe it is an invite-only torrent tracker for music.

Yep, its the replacement for what.cd

http://redacted.ch

https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html

I was going to ask how Redacted compares to Waffles, but it looks like Waffles is almost a decade older, which likely translates to the number of releases pretty well.

Though, Waffles had a sizeable fall in activity in the last couple years—notably coinciding with the closure of What. One would think that What-expats would bring in fresh blood.

After what died, there was a flurry of invites to both waffles and redacted. However, waffles went down for some reason for a few days right when everyone was looking, so everyone went to redacted

It went down and lost control of its domain, eventually reappearing at a different TLD. A lot of people probably got lost in the move.

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