The Internet Archive sent me an email to let me know that their Live Music Archive was about to hit 100,000 downloads. Since I uploaded two of live shows there, featuring 30+ tracks of music, they thought I might be interested. (Download my live shows here)
I am. Though I don't visit it much, I love the Internet Archive. What a great service they provide. It's a free place to share music, images, video, software, etc.
Their Wayback Machine even archives webpages. For example, you can see that by March 2001, the Brobdingnagian Bards' song “Tolkien (The Hobbit & Lord of the Rings)” was #4 on the Celtic Charts. A year later, we were #1 until the site shut down.
You can also see how much website changed from 2009 to 2005 when I quit my day job and started singing about cats to 2003 with my first homepage on my own domain before it evolved into Autoharp Music Tips. Oh! Check out my first Brobdingnagian Bards homepage in 1999.
Attention: you might need to click the “Impatient?” link to access the page.
Sorry, got sidetracked with memories. The point of this wasn't to reflect, but rave about the concept of preservation. I'm so thankful that something like this exists. Just like I'm thankful for sites like Modern Bard.
Modern Bard is a website that catalogs every album released by a Renaissance festival or SCA musician. That's a LOT of music! It's all done for free too. But what if, each of those artists, who albums are no longer available, had given the Internet Archive permission to share their music. That's what the band Slainte did.
Slainte is a Celtic group that I first heard on MP3.com. They probably the first big traditional band on the site. The group broke up years ago. However, one of their band members posted their two albums for free on the Internet Archive, keeping that music alive and available for ever. (Or at least until the Slavine return and make Earth a wasteland to sell to the highest intergalactic bidder)
Personally, I want my music to be available long after I'm dead. My albums are not only my retirement, they are also my inheritance to my wife, my daughter, and of course you. It's my legacy. It's the reason why I continue to record live shows.
In fact, I probably have music from a hundred live shows (mostly Brobdingnagian Bards performances) sitting on my hard drive, awaiting the day when I have time to edit the shows, post them on the Internet Archive or put together another bootleg album.
I also encourage you to do the same. I think anyone can post live shows on my Internet Archive page. Tom Emerson did that, though somehow it didn't link to my page. So I'm not sure how easy it is.
Regardless, record a show with a Zoom or other digital recorder. Post it on the Internet Archive. Take pictures. Post them on Facebook or flickr. Create a video and post it on YouTube.
I'm a big supporter of Creative Commons, and I give you permission to share my music. You can start with my free CD.
If you want an offline means of sharing it too, get my free stickers.
