Traditional Music Library is this huge repository

• OLD-TIME (OLDTIMEY) MUSIC
• BLUEGRASS
• ETHIOPIAN MINSTRELSY, MUSIC-HALL & VAUDAVILLE MUSIC
• TRADITIONAL DANCE
• BAWDY & DRINKING SONGS

They even have a section on Musical Education. Within it are all sorts of articles on playing instruments, writing songs, and musical theory. Hell, there are even instructions on making your own Spanish guitar. This site is well worth a poke around, even if traditional and folk music are not up your alley.

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 naive 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.