Internet Archive: Adding New Features to the Internet Archive Music Experience. “Our online digital library is best known for its immense archive of web pages and websites in the Wayback Machines. Less well known are the million-plus recordings the site has stored digitally and made available to the general public, mostly from 78s, albums and CDs. Highlighting the growing importance of music on archive.org is the debut this month of our new music player.”
Music
Lifehacker: The Best Podcasts for Discovering New Music
Lifehacker: The Best Podcasts for Discovering New Music. “I like to discover my music anywhere but the radio: playlists, TV soundtracks, best-of lists, subway bands, TikToks, overheard songs in bars and stores and coffeeshops…and podcasts. What a fantastic medium for trying out new music. A music podcast is like your favorite radio show on demand—and of course many of the best are simply rebroadcasts of actual radio shows, with quieter commercials and no wacky morning DJs. These are my favorite shows for discovering new and new-to-me music, or re-discovering old favorites.”
Brisbane Times: Iconic Stratocaster launches Powerhouse Museum’s virtual collection
Brisbane Times: Iconic Stratocaster launches Powerhouse Museum’s virtual collection. “In the summer of 1963, Jan and Dean and The Beach Boys were top of the pops and so too were Australian surf band The Atlantics with a twangy surf instrumental that made its four band members household names. Fame proved fleeting with The Beatles soon to dominate the music charts but the red Fender Stratocaster used to create that unique reverberated sound is one of the first culturally significant objects in the Powerhouse Museum collection to be digitised.”
DJ Magazine: Listen To This 239GB Archive Of German Techno Mixes
DJ Magazine: Listen To This 239GB Archive Of German Techno Mixes. “A huge library of German techno mixes has been shared online. You can listen to it below. The mixes are taken from the Hr3 and XXL Clubnight radio programs, which ran out of Frankfurt from 1990 through until 2014.”
Rock ‘n’ roll, clowns, and Roberta Flack: An inside look at a massive new collection of music photography at The Bancroft Library (Berkeley Library News)
Berkeley Library News: Rock ‘n’ roll, clowns, and Roberta Flack: An inside look at a massive new collection of music photography at The Bancroft Library. “Looking through the photographs is like flipping through stacks of vinyl at Amoeba Music, a satisfying exercise in nostalgia. Scanning through the folders, you’ll see Judy Collins, Elvis Costello, Bonnie Raitt, Neil Young, and so many in between… The photographs, 60,000 in all, make up the Howard Brainen photo archive. A recent gift to Bancroft, the archive is a time machine into a moment in music history, offering a glimpse into the local scene and the larger-than-life figures who came through the Bay Area.” It’s worth reading the article just to see the pictures included with it.
University of New Haven: Professor Strives to Use Music to Share the Culture of Refugees
University of New Haven: Professor Strives to Use Music to Share the Culture of Refugees. “Before joining the University of New Haven faculty in 2012, Erica Haskell, Ph.D. lived and worked in a refugee camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina. While in Europe, she also visited camps in Hungary, Serbia, and Romania, recording refugee stories and songs from around the world. She hopes to continue this work through the launch of the Schindler Refugee Music Project, which will share the experiences of refugees living in New Haven, by presenting their stories and the music of their home countries through podcasts.”
Popular Music in Movies and Television, 1920s – 1981
Another find via Reddit: a database covering popular music in movies and television from the 1920s to 1981. It’s called Lights, Camera Backbeat. From the About page: “LCB starts at the beginning of synchronised sound and film with early Vitaphone and Phonofilm musical shorts in the 1920’s and continues up to the birth of MTV in 1981. The 1980’s launched a new era in music on film with a massive increase in music videos produced for TV use as well as home video product on VCR and Betamax. Prior to 1981 there were often only limited chances to see major pop music performers on TV and in the cinema, particularly if you lived outside the USA.” I did a couple of quick searches; the database did not contain Paul Anka’s performances in GIRLS TOWN and did not contain Mamie Van Doren’s songs from UNTAMED YOUTH. So lots of results, but nowhere near complete.
