UNINNOVATE / Engineering At Its Finest

The Internet Archive is an effort to preserve culture in the digital age. As more and more of our music, writing, and general human knowledge is shared online, it is at risk of disappearing when files are deleted or hard drives fail. In an attempt to preserve history, the Internet Archive is buiding a historical record which is available for free to everyone:

Libraries exist to preserve society’s cultural artifacts and to provide access to them. If libraries are to continue to foster education and scholarship in this era of digital technology, it’s essential for them to extend those functions into the digital world.

The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet (a new medium with major historical significance) and other “born-digital” materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come.

Internet Archive: About IA

While this all sounds very abstract and lofty, the Internet Archive is actually very accessible and practical. For fans of live music, the Internet Archive provides the largest online collection of concert recordings available anywhere. All of the recordings are free to download (in compressed or lossless formats) and are completely legal and DRM-free. Only bands and artists that support free trading of live shows are archived and copyright is respected.

There are many great recordings available, but digging through the nearly 40,000 concerts from over 2,000 bands archived is a daunting task. Here are some starting points:

• Pop fans will probably like Jack Johnson and Gavin DeGraw.
• Fans of indie rock will jump right to bands like Ween, The Decemberists, Spoon, or My Morning Jacket.
• Fans of singer/songwriters will want to check out Ryan Adams and Elliott Smith.
• Rock fans have a lot of choices with bands like Death Cab for Cutie, The Soundtrack Of Our Lives, and even Jack Black’s Tenacious D.
• Fans of jam bands rarely have a hard time finding concert recordings online, but there are more here than anywhere else: String Cheese Incident, Keller Williams, O.A.R., Phil Lesh, etc.

This is just the beginning of what the Live Music Archive offers. If you like live music, this is an incomparable resource. You don’t want to miss it.

technorati tags:internet, archive, archive.org, live, music, drm-free