Internet Archive - Exploring Live Music Archive with Dave Mallick - The Lorenzo's Music Podcast(Transcript)
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Tom Ray: Hi, and welcome to another Lorenzo’s Music Podcast. I’m Tom, and on this show I talk with musicians, people who make music, plus people who do things for musicians, create software, and other things for musicians and people who provide a service for musicians. And, today I have someone who provides a service for musicians, actually provides a service for much, much more. But I’m going to be focusing on the music part of it. So, why don’t you introduce yourself and tell the people who you are and what it is you do? Sure.
David Mallick: My name is Dave Mallick. I live in San Diego. I work in education. But, my purpose here, I guess on this is, my status as a volunteer for the archive.org Internet Archive, and specifically the Live Music Archive and tape section collections. A live music fan, probably since the late 90s, started recording right around then and uploading my own materials and very quickly got into the online digital music scene before it was all of the streaming wonderfulness, that exists now. So it’s just been something I’ve been involved in for over 20 years. At this point, I would say.
Tom Ray: Okay, I was just going to ask, how long have you been doing it? Because that is. It’s funny to think about streaming. It actually hasn’t been around that long. Yeah, but it seems like it’s been around forever. But, yeah, there was. It’s the. The archive was. Places to host music was difficult. Like, there was. There were different services that have come and gone. I don’t know if you remember MP3 locker or, the. Now, I can’t even think of other ones. But archive.org was one where. Oh, Internet underground music archive, which you guys also back up.
David Mallick: Definitely remember that.
Tom Ray: But, now I want to ask you, you said you worked specifically on the live, How do you say it again? The live Music archive.
David Mallick: Yeah. So Internet Archive is. I mean, it’s the Wayback machine. It’s all the different collections. There’s videos and audio and stuff. I got involved in it, so I guess going back the late 90s.
Tom Ray: Okay.
David Mallick: Started getting involved in online music, through an organization called etree.org and it was basically just a loose collective of live music enthusiasts who basically said there has to be a good way to collect, archive, distribute and standardize a lot of the live recordings that we have and are digitizing. And at that point, you know, cassette was starting to fade out, DAT and digital recording was starting to come in, and there was really, you know, they were really large files. If we Wanted to preserve them at their, at their highest possible right. And so Etree basically devised a system where each band would have their own abbreviation. They standardized a date format, they standardized like a text file format for like getting all the information out there, checksums. Because you know, back then it would take hours and hours and hours to download, you know, a 500 to 800 megabyte show, which is typically what one or two hour show would involve. And a lot of that was done through FTP. And you needed to make sure that the downloads were valid and that the files weren’t corrupted or anything. but the issue was always hosting because it was always there was FTP. This BitTorrent was I think, just starting to round in. But that’s not really permanent storage. And so there were a few folks who I guess knew some people at archive.org and said, would you be interested in hosting a collection for specifically, the E Tree community, which was for distribution of bands whose, who allowed recording and allowed their recordings to be distributed online. and back then it was kind of a revolutionary thing because bands, you know, they wanted to be able to make money off of their recordings. And so giving them away for free and allowing them to be streamed online was seen as kind of a dangerous proposition. especially in, you know, MP3 format, which a lot of, you know, audio, audio audio files would see as lower quality, especially back then the resolution and the sizes that were involved in being downloaded. and so the selling point was basically like, we are uploading these for non commercial use only for free distribution, but in the highest possible quality. So if it was recorded in 16 bit or 24 bit, those would be preserved alongside any streaming derivatives that were available. And to our surprise, a lot of bands were saying yes. There were a few holdouts, some big names, you know, back then were saying no at first. you know, Fish, Dave Matthews Band, Widespread Panic, a lot of the, you know, more popular larger bands out there who kind of wanted to do their own thing. But it really turned into a great tool for a lot of smaller and up and cominging bands to just get their stuff out there. it started off as fans uploading their own recordings, but then bands would approach us directly and say, like, hey, we’ve recorded some stuff, we want to put it up there so our fans can hear it. and so there’s a lot of collections out there that just have a handful of recordings up there, but there are others that have thousands and thousands and thousands.
Tom Ray: I didn’t know that they would actually reach out directly. I thought it was always fan driven and I kind of always. I knew about it, I didn’t participate in it. And the whole live venue recording, I remember the debate going on and also reading about it when bands would get upset of the recordings. And the thing is, is that kind of put them in a bad light, which weird because they’re basically going, don’t celebrate us fans. Or at least that’s how it was taken. There was a weird like, give and pull where it’s like, no, of course it’s our music and we wouldn’t let you steal our music, so why would we let you record the live recordings? But then it’s kind of like, well, no, they’re celebrating you, they want to share it. people who couldn’t go to the show. So there was a weird debate and it, it did quickly, like a lot of them came around. Like you said, it, it became kind of a, yeah, go ahead and record it. Some people it’s still the don’t, you know, use now it’s don’t use your phones at the, at the recording. But I will admit that’s because those are hugely poor quality. And you were saying you want to do large or, good quality Now. I did not know. I always looking at the live Archive version of Internet Archive, I thought it was mainly focused on the Grateful Dead. I thought it was bringing in that community. I did not know about this whole E Tree thing. And so how, how was that community started if they were doing it FTP before then? Was Etree a service that hosted it? Was it just individuals going, I have it on mine here? And Etree was kind of like the early search engine where it would just be links to these different servers that had it. Like, how did that work?
David Mallick: I mean, it was kind of a loose confederation of a bunch of different people. So there was somebody who I think knew, all right, so back then, I guess I should say there was a file format called shorten, which was basically one of the first and earliest compression formats for lossless audio. and it was fine, it did the trick for what it was, but it wasn’t seekable, it wasn’t taggable, the license was not free. And so I think one of the organizers of Etree knew the developer of Flaccid, which is free lossless audio codec, which is much more extensible and has continued in development over the years. and so they decided that that was going to kind of be their, their standard going forward for preserving those. And so they didn’t host anything specifically on the Etree website, but there was a message board, there was a mailing list. and there was a. There was and still is a BitTorrent site. So off of the etree.org, you have the bt.etree.org, which is for BitTorrents. there’s the basic etree.org, which was just basically a wiki where they would just host all of this information. There was a message board, like I said, there were a bunch of mailing lists where people would just post like, this is what I have on my FTP this week. Feel free to come in and download it. And some stuff was temporary hostage because temporary hosting because they just didn’t have the space. And some of it was permanent because they just had a massive amount of storage space. and then I think they joined up with a project that I was more involved with, which is db.etree.org, which is the database, basically, of every live recording out there imaginable, where people could add their own. they could host their own lists of what they had. They could just host archives of known performances even if they hadn’t been recorded, just in case the recording popped up eventually. They could then tie it to that recording. So it’s kind of like a. Like these days, it’s Setlist FM is kind of the gold standard for that. But, the idea behind E Tree was cataloging all known live recordings by a given band. And so a fan of a particular band could sign up to be an administrator for that band’s recordings. so back then, I was really into. Back. I was and still am really into Blues Traveler. So I signed up to catalog all of the known digital recordings in circulation for Blues Traveler. Wow. And as I was maintaining that, I noticed that there were other records that might not have been as accurate or as consistent. And so I started correcting them. And the people in charge of that website kind of noticed that I was pretty reliable and pretty good at submitting, you know, decent corrections. And they invited me to be an admin there. And then when they hooked up with archive.org, they offered me the possibility of coming over there as a volunteer administrator, which is kind of where I am now. I am not as active as I once was, but when the project was first getting off the ground in, like, 04 - 05, I was probably a half dozen people. One of a half dozen people that would get the emails that would set up the collections, that would make sure that everything that was uploaded was kind of in line with the artist’s wishes. Because at that point we really wanted to make sure that, you know, we didn’t have any big name artists that said yes and then got a bunch of terrible sounding recordings.
Tom Ray: Okay, all right. And so doing that you’re talking about, you’re making sure that everything was like you were listening, listening to whole venue recordings and, Okay, okay, all right. I was going to say that must take hours to weeks to do.
David Mallick: Oh, gosh, no. I can’t even imagine doing that back then, let alone now. No, we would make sure that people weren’t uploading MP3s, that everything that was uploaded had some sort of documentation.
Tom Ray: You were even disciplining it in the sense of what the format was.
David Mallick: Okay, all right, absolutely. we also made sure that there were no commercial recordings allowed. So if somebody taped a recording off the TV or off of satellite radio, that is explicitly against the terms and conditions of. Like Sirius xm, for example, doesn’t allow their recordings to be distributed. So.
Tom Ray: Okay.
David Mallick: And then also just kind of staying in touch with the bands. So if the band saw something and they said, you know what, we don’t really like that recording, would you mind taking it down for us? You know, we would respond, respect their wishes and do that. there were some bands that said, you can upload audience recordings, but you can’t upload soundboards. Or they would say, anything below, you know, before 2006 is fine, but anything after that we want to try to sell ourselves. So there’s a little bit of monitoring for the bands that we knew that we kind of had to pay a little bit more attention to.
Tom Ray: Yeah, that, is interesting because people do still release live recordings, so sometimes it’s like, don’t release this one because we are planning to actually press that.
David Mallick: Yep. Okay. So we were sometimes in the awkward position of having to tell a taper, like, hey, we have to take your recording down because the band is going to release it, but don’t tell anybody.
Tom Ray: Right. That’s true too, because then it’s also leaking information. That’s funny. Now you had moved to. So you went from Etree and then, you mentioned that it was then, the Internet Archive. Did they approached you or you approached them or how did, how did that work?
David Mallick: There was a lot of overlap between the folks at DB E Tree and the people who were starting archives. So I knew a lot of the. A lot of the same players. And I said, you know what? Hey, I have a couple hundred recordings that I’m going to be uploading. I don’t want to overwhelm you guys in case anything goes wrong, like, is there any chance, like, you’d be. You’d consider making me an admin so that I could kind of manage this kind of stuff?
Tom Ray: Gotcha.
David Mallick: And I think, which is still kind
Tom Ray: of how they do it to this day. It really is just like reach out to them and they will make a decision and go, here you go. Especially I’ve noticed that at around, definitely, funding the project Times, they do have a lot more people who are kind of doing some voluntary cleanup or looking around and organizing and trying to make sure all the libraries are doing what they should, are implementing new things. And I’ve even been reached out. I used to have a previous podcast that I did that was exclusively hosted on Internet Archive. And somebody reached out and was just like, hey, I’ve arranged all these into your own page with an RSS feed. And it’s like, wait, I could do that? I had no idea. So I do know that that is one way to go about it. And so when you did that, they, you said they were just starting out. So, were they hosting other things? Like, do you happen to know how it began around the time that you were, you said they were starting out and there was overlap with Etree I don’t know the actual beginnings of Internet Archive. And I was curious, I just was wondering that.
David Mallick: It’s been 20 plus years, so it’s a little bit fuzzy for me. But basically, from what I remember, the folks at Etree were approached. I think there was some degree of kind of behind the scenes negotiation at first. but there was and maybe still is a live music fan who is one of the admins, who’s one of the higher up admins at ark, who basically said, like, I think we could make this happen.
Tom Ray: All right.
David Mallick: I remember seeing the discussion of the initial outreach. I think it was on the message boards. I don’t think it was on the mailing list, but I think it was on the message boards. Which may mean that the initial outreach still exists. But, his name was Jon Azen, A I Z E N. And he basically contacted the Etree admins or the mailing list or something and said, what if we could host everything?
Tom Ray: Okay.
David Mallick: And the idea back then in 2005, 2006 was just, there is no way that there’s. There’s just no way that there’s enough storage for all of the stuff that we would upload.
Tom Ray: Right.
David Mallick: You know, at that point, you’re thinking, like, you know, the average hard drive is, you know, maybe a couple hundred gigabytes at most, and that up really easily with the Grateful Dead collection, for example, or every recording of Fish out there. and they said, no, let’s. Let’s give it a try. Let’s, you know, show us what you got. And so it just kind of turned into a free. For all of people uploading stuff. I think we got an initial, you know, few dozen bands enrolled at first, and the recordings just started coming in, and they just kind of never stopped. And really, we have never once run into storage issues. I mean, to their credit, they promised.
Tom Ray: It surprises the heck out of me.
David Mallick: It really does. I mean, you know, obviously back then, the uploads weren’t nearly as fast as they are now, and there were a lot of glitches and things like that. But, And I think I remember looking back at this at one point and that the first upload was a Rusted Root concert where they were opening for Rat dog in, like, 2000 or something. I mean, it wasn’t, you know, it wasn’t some, you know, grandiose thing where they, you know, threw the doors open and there were already hundreds of recordings there. It was just kind of, all right, what’s available? What do I have on my hard drive? What can I upload? And I think that Rusted Root show was. Was. Was the first one. but a lot of the, you know, the, you know, Grateful Dead offshoots kind of back then were really popular. Rat Dog and the other ones. And to their credit, somebody in their camp said yes, and people just kind of went to town, warts and all. And we’ve really had very few artists reach out and say, like, hey, we don’t. This doesn’t sound good, or, we’ve changed our mind. We want to take stuff down. I mean, there has been a few things here and there. Management changes and attitudes change, and a lot of it has been, you know, don’t rock the boat. If the. If the artist has already said yes, don’t reach back out to the artist, because they might have changed their mind and they might say no.
Tom Ray: Right.
David Mallick: But for the most part, it’s been onward and upward, and the explosion of it moved. It is interesting because you can kind of see the rhythm in that. There’s generations where there are people who grew up listening to stuff on Archive, and then they went to college and they graduated and they started their own band and they said, you know what, I really love having being able to listen to anything that I want at any time and I want to do that for the music that I’m making. And so there are definitely second or even third generation probably at this point of people who grew up listening to bands on there and then starting their own bands and uploading stuff. So it’s kind of heartening to see that if you want to use it as a promotional vehicle, you can. There was one show that ended up being embedded in a band’s website and they all of a sudden blew up. And that show is I think by far the most popular one on the archive. Just because every time you would load the band’s website, that show would load up and start playing in an embedded player. And it was like hundreds of thousands of views, over the next one. I can’t remember the statistics now, but that one show, a band called Upper Revolution or oar, was far and away the most popular one during that time period because people just didn’t use the, they didn’t use it that way.
Tom Ray: Right?
David Mallick: This band just said, hey, we have a, ah, live show that’s up there that we like that we’re just going to use to promote ourselves. And they embedded it and it just,
Tom Ray: it just shot up and talking about the time period where, and not to be like back in our day, but the time period when a show like that would be really hard to upload to host. And also there was no YouTube. And even when YouTube came around at first you could do anything more than 15 minutes, if I’m not mistaken, for a very, very long time when you signed up for a YouTube account, you know, it was, yeah, things like that. So that having that embedded in there is a revolutionary thing or being able to put that out there. Now the other thing I want to bring up too is while we’re talking about this, we’re talking about people allowing it to be put up there. This isn’t just like, okay, this isn’t Napster, this isn’t. Now, this type of stuff, the live music, you’re saying people were like, okay, you can use it. It was kind of, I want to say fair use in a way. I mean that’s probably incorrect in a way to put it. But it was, they were allowing it, but it’s not like, okay, now upload that band’s album to the Internet archive. That is not what do. So I wanted to clarify that. So now let’s Talk about more the hosting, music. I want to say, here’s my weird background. While you were saying people grew up, listening to the live archives, I actually came about to it a different way. Even though I’m a musician and I found it as a way to go, oh, I can upload and host my music there for a long time, still do it. But I actually discovered it because of the old Time Radio archives. I’m actually a huge Old Time radio nerd. I must have listened to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater a million times to suspense. You know, I’ve listened to all those things on there and that’s how I discovered it was through that because I was looking at forums that were, talking about old, radio shows. So. But anyway, so getting to. Then I would host my band there. Now, uploading music, is that strictly a user uploads it sort of situation. Are there people who go, we want to submit our stuff together. They’re like, say, labels or anything like that. How is music being hosted? And also, I guess policed would be the question.
David Mallick: Yeah, I mean at the beginning it was definitely all user based. I think originally there was an FTP upload.
Tom Ray: There was, There was, yeah, I remember that.
David Mallick: And then you would basically like finish up the process through the web and then a process would just grab it off the FTP server, move it to a final hosted server, and then that would be where it would go and do all the derivations and start streaming.
Tom Ray: Actually, if I’m not mistaken, when it switched, they said, try the new uploader. And I think the uploading way there on the archive right now still says try the new uploader. It’s just the only way you can do it. I think you can switch to FTP, but it still says like the new uploader on the uploading process.
David Mallick: I think I do remember seeing that. Yeah. I think there’s like an automated way of doing it now. So Widespread Panic is one of the big bands that just recently authorized, uploading. And the person who has the most recordings, I think he figured out a way. There’s probably some command line way of doing it, automates all the uploads. And I’ve never had as much bulk to do to bother figuring that out. But it is rarely a day that goes by that I don’t upload something. Yeah, just because I am constantly working on stuff. you know, I have my own recordings. I am doing recordings of other bands for other tapers out there. I have people sending Me, boxes of cassette tapes and DATs and somebody has a bunch of mini discs that I probably couldn’t handle, but I might be able to scare up a disk, a drive for that. but yeah, I would say probably 90% of the stuff out there is fan made recordings and the other 10, which is still a significant amount, is directly from, from the bands themselves. But you don’t. I don’t say. I wouldn’t say there is anybody with like management or labels out there uploading materials. It’s mostly either bands or fans or band members that just decide like, hey, we have a recording from, you know, our front of house engineer that we think sounds really good and we’ll just throw this out there. Like it’s not perfect, but it’s something that we kind of want them to hear. Those are mostly, I would say smaller bands that do that, that upload their own materials. but for the most part it’s people who just go to shows, throw a couple microphones up in the air or plug a recorder into the soundboard and kind of do their own thing.
Tom Ray: Yeah, and the whole page layout and everything has evolved over the years, but it’s been pretty consistent in the sense that when you upload it, what it does too, like say you upload, and we haven’t even talked about this yet, you upload a WAV file or you upload a lossless file of some sort. And in the background what it does is the archive actually turns it into different downloadable formats. So I upload a WAV file. Say I upload an entire album of mine, each song for the whole album, like singularly on one page. Then the page itself, the archive will do some work in the background and you come back like an hour later and There will be MP3s Ogg files, there will be an M3U of it, there will be a torrent of it, which it’s built like it does all this in the background. And this is something I feel isn’t really known among musicians. Like you can. Yeah, it will do all that stuff for you and it’s offered on the page and you can even download it as a zip. So have they been doing that the whole time? Is that. I know it’s been there for a really long time, but I don’t know if it’s always been that way. Like these different, I want to say, deprecated versions of the audio and stuff, but I don’t know a better way to put it. But the, the different versions that are offered have they done that for a long time.
David Mallick: Like do you know, I think they have. And that was one of the big things was at the beginning was that bands, some bands did not want MP3s available and some audio files also did not want MP3s available. And so when still it’s. There’s still a toggle that if you upload a show and you decide you don’t want an MP3 version of it for whatever reason, right. You can just check a box and say I only want lossless up there. And then it won’t stream. Like you just, you know, people would have to go to the page, download the files and play them in their own stream. But probably 99% of them do have those derivatives alongside them. And that’s. It’s been that way since the very beginning. And the form is pretty smart too is that if you have. Everything that I upload these days is in flack and it’s tagged and so it’ll just take. It’ll read the tags off of the files and auto populate the titles and, and the artist and the track number and everything. So there’s really very little that needs to be done afterwards. is it just. It just generates everything. I mean it is possible to go back in and modify stuff afterwards, which hm. I’m eternally grateful for because you know, you could go year months or even years later, somebody will leave a review and say hey, track number four is called this. And so I can just go back in and edit it and update it and it just takes right away and it’s five minutes and it’s fixed.
Tom Ray: Not only that, but you can actually like say one of the recordings gets. One of the tracks gets remastered or something. You can replace that on the page as well. And it does that. And also having the in page player which years ago they created a toggle so you can actually use the Winamp player, which I think is hilarious.
David Mallick: Yeah, yeah.
Tom Ray: And the other thing too, is along with this, people uploading stuff, it also was, I want to say the home for Net labels for the longest time, which I don’t know if Net labels are really a thing anymore. I feel like I don’t. I know a few, but I don’t know if any new ones pop up. But do you know much about the background of Net labels and how they started using it? Because Net labels are an interesting thing. They’re not actual labels. They’re people who support bands who. By doing releases or collections or even the archiving work, like you were saying with The Live Archive, they do like the work for them to promote it, to package it, to put it out there for these bands that they like. At least that’s my understanding of it.
David Mallick: I know that the collection exists. I know very little about it.
Tom Ray: Okay, all right.
David Mallick: I was brought on specifically for the Live Music Archive and then. Oh, you were?
Tom Ray: Okay.
David Mallick: The offshoot of that, which only debuted within the last year and a half, I think it was like not last October, but the one before that is the Taper Section collection.
David Mallick: Which is more of a. Not a don’t ask, don’t tell, but it was, it’s more for bands that either did not originally give permission for Archive and just haven’t been for the Live Music Archive and haven’t been re approached or for newer bands that just for whatever reason can’t get their, can’t get their act together to actually say yes, we actually want a collection. So all of the bands that originally said no, we’d rather not do that for the most part have come around, but there are still a few holdouts. And so there’s that taper section collection, which is basically any band that is known to have allowed recording at some point. there’s just a whole bunch of stuff that’s uploaded there. So that’s your fish, your Dave Matthews Band. there’s, there’s just all sorts of random stuff there too. Opening acts for otherwise taper friendly bands. a lot of stuff that I record with, with, with the band’s knowledge that don’t have collections, I’ll, I’ll put up there as well.
Tom Ray: Okay, now let’s ask this, let me ask this about the the Live Archive. Now bands that just record themselves live or have a recording live, like I guess just to make it clear to people what is, Are there any requirements? Are there any sort of things where it’s like because they could just upload it to the archive and not know about the Live Archive, but if they wanted to upload it to the archive, are there specific things they have to meet requirements? Are there things that need to be done differently to get it specifically in the archive, or is there no real requirements? I guess if I were to upload one of our live recordings, what should I expect to know first? Wait, is that a good sentence? No, what should I know first before doing it? Or are there requirements?
David Mallick: So if you specifically want a recording in the Live Music Archive collection, there needs to be a band collection first. Because when you upload a recording it says, what band is this for? And then you just, okay, that’s the band name in there and you choose from the drop down. And so if your band isn’t there, it’s just going to kind of go into, into a limbo state, and not really be able to do anything. there is a community archive section which is basically kind of a catch all for anything. and that’ll happen if you just click upload, drag the files over, it’ll just automatically assign it a title and then you just fill in a little bit of the metadata and you just hit go and it’s just there. that collection is not really organized so you got to kind of pick your identifier, choose your link carefully, make sure that it makes sense because it might just grab a track title. And that’s just the name of your, that’s just the URL of your file. so there is a form and I can’t remember which email it is. Now it used to be one email address and now it’s a different one. But if you are interested in setting up a collection, you send an email to that address and then one of the admins will kind of see it, collect it, make sure that the recording is, make sure that the collection is set up and then the next time you go to upload something you can select that band name from the from the dropdown field.
Tom Ray: Okay. I guess that’s what I was trying to. In my roundabout. How do I explain this sort of question that I did? Yeah, that’s right. I guess I should have just gone through the process. When I upload something, community audio is pretty much the one option I have. There are other options, but they don’t apply to what I’m doing for audio. And that’s the thing is I’m like, I don’t know how to put it in the live archive. And you’re saying that because you would need to submit and then have that as a choice on there and it would be connected to your mail, to your email. Because right now it really is like there. I guess that’s not obvious either. There’s not a. For my band, Lorenzo’s Music, when I upload, it doesn’t go, here’s the Lorenzo’s Music section. No, I can put in the title of the band and that will be clickable as it will search for creator of in the search. But that’s all it’s doing is it’s going. We’ve searched all the creators that are labeled this and this is all the Audio that you’ve uploaded. There’s no page. There’s no here’s, you know, search for this band on there. You’re only searching by actual search, like searching a database, not a, not a page. And that’s what I was getting at. So you’re saying that someone would need to actually submit and go. We plan on doing more of this. We’d like a page.
David Mallick: If you do want that kind of central thing that has the collection on it. Yes. I mean, if you’re really good at tagging and you’re really good at being consistent in how you document your stuff, there’s really no reason to specifically go through the Live Music Archive. back in the day when there were only a few dozen bands, it made more sense to look at the here are all the bands in the Live Music archive page. And now there’s just thousands and thousands. And so it’s. I don’t think anybody’s going to go to the main Live Music Archive page, go to the bands listing, shift through the bands. I mean, people are just going to search. So. Right. It’s less a, hierarchical thing as it is like a tagging thing at this point. But yeah, if you do want to have your name in the dropdown to make it easier so that you don’t have to fill in that stuff every single time. a collection is the way is the way to go.
Tom Ray: Okay. And now also going to. And all this can be done. Like, you don’t have to be part of the live Music archive to upload stuff like that. And also just like the part that I did for years, and I still think people don’t really know they can do this is I hosted a podcast on there and it would literally, I use that to populate the, embedded UR or the embedded MP3 for the RSS that I did and all that. For years, just hosted it on Internet Archive. Now, how. How could people also create a podcast page? Is it the same sort of process if they wanted to do that? and that’s one of those things. During one of the years or one of the years when they were doing the, the pledge drive, I guess you would call it, they reached out and were like, hey, we organized your MP3s. And I was like, brilliant, thanks. So while you can upload them and just link to it, is it the same sort of process for podcasts and other things like that too?
David Mallick: I would assume so. I think there are other volunteer curators that work under, you know, not just audio specifically, but under Just kind of the archive umbrella, that would be able to help create a collection if it’s something that you, that you wanted to do, to kind of have a central spot for that. I mean it is, it is a form of audio. So I imagine it would still reside also within the community audio collection.
Tom Ray: Right. Yeah.
David Mallick: But, yeah, I would think anything that you would want to do to help organize that type of collection, if it’s going to be an ongoing thing, just to have the consistency and to have a home, to be able to link to all of those files, that’s probably just reaching out to the, to the curators.
Tom Ray: Okay. All right. And then what about. I asked earlier about the policing the files and I don’t think we ever actually got. We got distracted by another thing we talked about. But I know there’s the whole thing where like, and not to go into this, but there’s the whole like labels suing over like 78 RPM cylinder recordings and stuff like that. How is, how are uploads being policed? I mean, if I were to upload say and just for fun Metallica album right now, how would that instantly get taken down or go, hey, this can’t be put here? Or like, what is the process for making sure that stuff like that doesn’t happen? Not that it’s probably the perfect system, but.
David Mallick: Yeah.
Tom Ray: Is it really more community based or do you have people dedicated to it?
David Mallick: I would think it’s fair to say that it’s community based.
Tom Ray: Okay.
David Mallick: so I will. There are a couple of collections that I keep an eye on to know if there are new uploads there, just because I’m an enthusiast like that. And ah, I will occasionally see stuff in there that shouldn’t be there. We have somebody who is uploading airline materials in there, like documentation from airlines. And I don’t know why it keeps happening, but it always keeps landing in the same collection and it’s always formatted the same way and we delete the files and we block the account and then it just comes back the next day. So weird. Spam M and automation is definitely an issue. Oh yeah, I would say more so than copyright. Although we’re not going to get in trouble because of spam, we are going to get in trouble because of copyright issues. But for the most part the live music archive I think has a lot more hurdles to go through to be able to upload that kind of stuff. to the point where I think it’s difficult to automate Something that would upload a whole bunch of commercial recordings. that being said, I will say that the rest of the collections on arXiv are definitely not as well policed. And there is absolutely, I mean I can say for sure that there is copyrighted material up there. what I don’t know is what the level of access is to it because when I am logged into the site, I am logged in as an administrator. So I’m sure that there’s stuff that I can see that turns up in my searches that would not otherwise be available for a typical end user. there are some collections that are set to stream only that you cannot download the files. I’m sure they have come to some sort of an agreement with whoever the files originally came from. That said, like you can stream these or, or you can offer these in 15 second samples, but you can’t offer the full thing.
Tom Ray: whereas I have seen that there is sample. There’s a sampling section and it says you can sample a certain amount of this. Yeah, yep.
David Mallick: Yeah. So when I go in, I can see the whole file and I can download the source files if I wanted to. but I think for a regular non admin user, they probably wouldn’t be able to. To download. They might only be able to stream. really early on in this conversation you actually mentioned the. The IUMA and the entire iuma, I think is also hosted on our. Yes, there’s an archive collection. It’s an amazing resource.
Tom Ray: Well, and the what’s really funny is, okay, so I had to do a vanity search and my band wasn’t on there. But whatever, I know we uploaded to it, but but we are. There are different things. That’s the important of the importance of the Internet Archive. It does host, no longer available bits of the Internet. It’s not just the Wayback Machine. There is an entire library organized and cataloged of the Internet Underground Music Archive, which was like the, before, MySpace and all that kind of stuff for where you put your albums online. There’s Blip tv which was trying to be a Creative commons competitor to YouTube. And the entire library of all the stuff from Blip TV is up there now. And you can find that Jamendo back when you used to be able to search its site. There is, there’s an archive of all that stuff there. So you know, I think that’s really cool. And how does that get decided? Do you have any idea of how? Because a lot of them I know do have some sort of link to either, not public domain, but just, like, imminent. No, just. Just history, or they are actually connected to Creative Commons and things like that, and they ended up going away is decided upon. Do people approach the Internet Archive to host it there? Like, how does that happen?
David Mallick: I think it probably goes both ways. I mean, okay, the way the live music archive got started was somebody from Archive approached us and said, I think this would be a good match. But I’m sure there are organizations that say we have this giant archive of stuff that we don’t know what to do with and so would you be interested in hosting it? And the answer is almost always yes, I imagine.
Tom Ray: again, which is amazing.
David Mallick: Yeah. I’m not privy to those conversations, but I. I mean, I also know that there are collections on there that are entirely archival. Like they don’t even show up in search. there’s a live music torrenting website that, at least for a while, every single torrent that was uploaded to that website was downloaded and stored on Archive somewhere. So, can people access it? Can people download it? Probably not, but it was there for a while and it was a little bit of a controversy. But, And I should also say I am only speaking in my capacity as a curator. I don’t officially work there, so I’m not trying to get anybody in trouble, but these are just things that I have run into in my time.
Tom Ray: Yeah.
David Mallick: On the site. So,
Tom Ray: No. And that’s why I’m so glad.
David Mallick: Then maybe we cut that part out. But.
Tom Ray: Right. No, then that’s why I’m so glad to talk to you because it really is just knowing more about how, let’s say an admin access works rather than just as an uploader. Because I can sit here and just talk about I uploaded. It’s neat, but the. It really is just amazing. The amount of. When it started, it surprised me. I was just like, oh, I hope this sticks around. That’s so cool that you can host the things there. And. But there’s no way they can keep this going. And they have, and they keep going out and seeking for more things to archive and share with the world and actually truly be an Internet library and, you know, have access to that, that people can download it. The bandwidth and everything that it does just amazes me. And I can’t believe it’s still around today and still trying to find more things to store. So, Yeah, I don’t know. That just amazes me. Now, do you know anything about how long the Creative Commons Licensing has been around in the the actual uploading process itself. Like back when you were uploading to the live music stuff and then becoming an admin. Was it around. I know that it, I guess I should say it. Was it around when Creative Commons started? Because I want to say that was in 2005 that it started like was it adapted, right away? I want to say it’s one of the first services that implemented the process of using Creative Commons license. And do you recall that at all?
David Mallick: I feel like it was around back then. I think I remember that we were told not to use that because the recordings were not ours to grant license to. So I think the ability to choose a license was removed from specifically the Live Music archive uploader. and that was part of the reason why it got its own uploader was because there were, you know, I mean for just about everything else, whether it’s text, whether it’s audio, video, it mostly just goes through the same uploader. But we got this little carve out for the live music archive stuff M That I believe did not allow for the selection of a license because the understanding was that yes it was for non commercial use, but that we weren’t allowed to license it for anything else other than what we were uploading it for, which was just to have it available as a streaming archive.
Tom Ray: So there was no license in those respects. you just didn’t put one on it or. Because I remember the Free Music Archive, they used to have live in studio performances and they would release those on the Free Music Archive with wfmu, but they created their own license called the FMA license, basically going, hey guys, who are playing this is going to be put on our website and people are going to be able to download it. So we’re going to put a. It was more of a strict license in the sense that it was just. This is for, I want to say entertainment purposes only, but you know, did you have anything like that?
David Mallick: I don’t think so. It wasn’t that we were releasing it license free is that. It’s that we were specifically opting not to put a license license on it because.
Tom Ray: Okay, that’s what I meant.
David Mallick: Because the recordings did not belong to the people who made them or the. The rights to the recordings and the music contained in the recordings was not something that we were allowed to do.
Tom Ray: And then, do you know, going forward, what are some of the things that. Are there improvements or things that are. I mean, there’s no need to change perfection. But Are there any improvements or things you know about that are going to be happening to the live music archive or just anything you’re privy to, privy to as to what they want to do with it, things, ways they’d like to expand, or do they just like it the way it is?
David Mallick: I mean, other than updating some of the stuff in the back end, as far as like, you know, the. I think they’re constantly kind of updating the libraries of, of the programs that they use to actually create the derivations and to read the files that are uploaded. But feature wise I really can’t think of too, too much. I think they updated the player a number of years ago to make it a little bit more flexible and responsive, especially on mobile. But yeah, I’m not aware of any like roadmap to change anything specifically. as far as that’s concerned, no.
Tom Ray: Okay. And then, I just wanted to ask you, is there any place you’d like to let people know about places people should go or how they could connect with you that you’d like to share with anyone listening to the show today?
David Mallick: Oh, geez. I don’t really do too much on social media, so there’s nothing reach out to me. But yeah, it’s basically the live music archive and the taper section collection are the two that I am most intimately involved with. and if anybody wants to get into uploading their materials or if they have recordings that they need digitized, I’m sure that reaching out to either one of those collections would, be a good place to start because I know that people have boxes of dusty tapes and reels and discs in their basements or their attics. And you never know when you might have the only one remaining copy of something that’s out there because this stuff is disappearing. And really what this is, is cultural preservation.
Tom Ray: Exactly.
David Mallick: There is just no shortage of stuff out there, past, present, future, that doesn’t deserve to be archived because apparently the supply of storage is unlimited. So keep it coming.
Tom Ray: Well, I want to thank you so much for talking with me today. This has been great.
David Mallick: Yeah, I enjoyed it as well. Thank you.