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Kindle Libraries; treasure troves of infinitely playable songs on Spotify and Apple Music; dozens of shows and movies on Netflix, max.and Hulu. Even the Criterion Collection is now online. Cultural archives now live on server farms, to such an extent that the value of physical media appears to be constantly in flux. While it has some benefits (the ineffable experience of flipping through a book, having DVDs of your favorite show to watch when it disappears from the broadcast), the logistical problems involved in preserving massive archives of this stuff seem astronomical. Especially now, when many shows, comics, and albums aren’t even released on Blu-ray, bound editions, or LPs.
As physical media faces an increasingly uncertain and hostile future, its advocates are doing everything they can to protect what they consider an invaluable resource. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Contemporary Music ARCHIVE (ARC)a New York-based nonprofit organization that preserves and maintains the world’s largest collection of popular music.
It covers more than 3 million recordings, including the personal belongings of collectors such as the Rolling Stones guitarist. Keith Richardsbusinessman Zero Freitaslate director Jonathan Demmeand founder of the A-Square Record label jeep holland, the ARC has an impressive array of everything from autographed LPs to 78 blues to Brazilian and Haitian music. It also includes recordings, books and articles by music icons such as David Byrne and journalist Jon Pareles, and reputedly contains some of the world’s largest collections of Broadway, African, punk, jazz, country and western, folk, hip hop and experimental. recordings. It has become an important resource for researchers working on music history, graphic design or cultural heritage, and it is in danger.
Created in New York City in the mid-1980s, the ARC was originally conceived by founders B. George and the late David Wheeler, author and record collector, as a way to help preserve the legacy of an industry that At that point, Frankly, he hadn’t done a good job of keeping track of his own story. Sessions deteriorated and disappeared over time, private pressings of LPs passed into personal collections and never reappeared, and entire label catalogs were lost to musty basements and unsentimental relatives.
As the ARC grew, it outgrew the boundaries of its previous spaces and landed three years ago in a private commercial space in upstate New York owned by hotelier André Balazs. Now, the ARC says it has to vacate that space because, unbeknownst to them and Balazs, the building they occupy, known as “The Piggery,” is classified as an agricultural zone, a designation that cannot be changed. They’ve already received a million-dollar donation from a longtime supporter who would love to see them move into a new space, but no one else has come out of the woodwork to contribute.
B. George, an artist and record label founder who used his own collection of 47,000 records to seed the ARC, says the organization is looking for a benefactor like James Smithson, who donated the equivalent of $500,000 in gold sovereigns to the United States to found the Smithsonian, despite never having visited the United States. ARC, he says, needs someone “who can see the value in what we’re doing and who has the foresight to pressure the United States to do something it should have always been doing.”
