I hap­pened on a radio pro­gram called “Lost music of the 80’s” not too long ago. It was dis­ap­point­ing when after lis­ten­ing for a time I realised that I had heard before every song they were play­ing being as they were oft played sin­gles in my youth. And I’ll hear them all again when oldies radio starts becom­ing a more attrac­tive for­mat to me. There is no dan­ger of these songs being lost and I felt a more accu­rate title for the pro­gram would be “Big Hits of the 80’s”.

What I was expect­ing, based on the title, would be songs from albums that didn’t have great sales despite the great music they con­tained. Or early, obscure music from artists that became well estab­lished later on in their careers. Or even gems on big albums that weren’t picked as sin­gles, so remain­ing undis­cov­ered by new gen­er­a­tions who don’t own or plan­ning on own­ing that album. There is a plethora of recorded music lost in the album col­lec­tions of the gen­eral pub­lic. Songs that would only be famil­iar to the completists.

Con­sid­er­ing the amount of music that is pro­duced as a ratio to the num­ber of dif­fer­ent songs broad­cast, we have heard so very lit­tle. While, in part, the cur­rent func­tion of a radio sta­tion is to expose you to new music, the other func­tion is to expose you to it ad infi­tum, ad nau­seum. So even if they do ven­ture to play older songs, it’s older songs we’ve heard count­less times before. To that end the mod­ern radio for­mat is not geared towards enrich­ing our col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence, but then we knew that already.

Not that any of this is to sug­gest that radio should re-invent itself to bring you ‘all nov­elty, all the time’. There are many sources to lis­ten to which are eso­teric or eclec­tic. Even more now than were avail­able before the advent of inter­net, satel­lite and cable radio. It is naïve to expect that the busi­ness rela­tion­ship between record­ing com­pa­nies and com­mer­cial radio sta­tions will change any­time soon, or even that it should. I would just like to see that when they do try to expand the lis­ten­ers musi­cal cat­a­logue that it be an hon­est effort.

And this is just cov­er­ing the mod­ern record­ing era. If we ven­ture fur­ther back in time there are count­less songs recorded on vinyl, wax, paper, clay, etc that never see the light of day again. As a soci­ety it is imprac­ti­cal to store every datum that is pro­duced. It is even more imprac­ti­cal to search and review the enor­mous store­house of data. At the very least we may make mod­est attempts to gather a large cross-section of tran­sient works. If for noth­ing else than to give us a fine-grained pic­ture of the past. This is why I like sites such as Cylin­der Preser­va­tion and Dig­i­ti­za­tion Project or Open Source Audio that ded­i­cate them­selves to archiv­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing ephemeral music. We get to hear what else was going on at a spe­cific time other than much repeated ‘clas­sics’, giv­ing us a fuller view of the landscape.

Tags: Archiving, Esoteric Music, History, Popular Music, Radio

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 7:15 am and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.