EDITED TO ADD: Please see this followup post, and subscribe to the saveaussiemusic mailing list if you’re interested in this project.
So I’ve been thinking about this project for a while, and it doesn’t have a name, but I wanted to tell you about it anyway. At least I have my startup-style it’s X for Y pitch: it’s like textfiles.com for Australian indie music.
Yeah, well, let me explain.
For background, I’d better start by saying I was pretty terminally uncool, music-wise, in the 80s and early 90s. My family weren’t big on following popular music, I lived somewhere with no decent record stores, records were priced out of my range, and even at school the kids I hung with weren’t hip enough to make mix tapes of anything much but Top 40 stuff. Despite this, I somehow got exposed to a certain amount of Australian indie and alternative music. I say “somehow” because I honestly don’t know where I heard most of this stuff. I guess 3XY and EON-FM, early on. Later, I listened to a lot of Triple J, and watched Rage.
These days, of course, I get most of my musical knowledge and exposure from the Interwebs, and the availability of digital downloads and information about musicians is really helping me backfill a lot of the older Australian music I wish I’d known better at the time.
Like, for example, The Go-Betweens, a Brisbane indie band that I was only faintly aware of until a few years ago, when Grant McLennan died and many of my friends online were expressing sadness at his passing. Of course I quickly figured out that they were part of the soundtrack of my childhood and teens, I just didn’t know them.
The Go-Betweens were pretty well known, and it’s not hard to find their albums, but a lot of equally important Australian music from the 70s to 90s is no longer readily obtainable. Much of it’s not available for (legal) digital download. In many cases CDs are out of print, or there may never have been a CD release, and the only version is vinyl mouldering in someone’s garage. Even information about older Australian music is hard to find: now-defunct labels and publications don’t have websites, and bands that would otherwise pass Wikipedia’s notability guidelines often don’t have articles because it’s so hard to find sources/citations. Only a handful of hobbyist websites and generous-hearted bloggers are keeping vast swathes of our musical heritage alive.
So why did this happen? Well, obscure music is always hard to find. That’s what makes it obscure. But in Australia even a bunch of pretty well known stuff, stuff I grew up on in my no-hipster-cred-whatsoever suburban youth, is rare as hen’s teeth now. For some reason, music that was released on the Mushroom and Festival labels was particularly likely to have this problem. So I asked around, and learnt that those labels, which had released some of the best music of my adolescence, had been consumed first by News Corp and then by Warner, who didn’t care enough to keep the back-catalogs available. I don’t even know how many smaller labels were caught up in this, but I’m guessing plenty.
(The good news is that this seems to be clearing up a little now. More stuff seems to be available in iTunes since last time I checked, and I hear that Warner recently sold back Flying Nun Records (NZ) to the original owners. So there is hope.)
So here’s what I want to do. I’d like to start a project for people — techies, music nerds, archivists, whoever — to come together and work on projects to preserve and disseminate (information about) Australian music, in as free and open a manner as possible: open source code, creative commons licenses, non-commercial and optimised for maximum sharing and reuse.
First project (something I’ve been meaning to do anyway) is to extract pertinent facts about artists, albums, and labels from a variety of online sources (such as, for example, the archived website of The Encyclopedia of Australian Rock and Pop) and use it to update MusicBrainz (and from there, hundreds of sites and apps that use MusicBrainz’s data).
Then I’d like to make sure that any Australian musical acts that are sufficiently notable have Wikipedia entries. In many cases this will mean grovelling through pre-Internet dead trees publications, but I’m going to be in Australia and probably unemployed through the summer and I hear that libraries have air conditioning and Internet access these days, so that actually sounds quite pleasant. Along the way, I hope to make a resource list for other Australians who’d like to do the same thing: which libraries have useful collections of music periodicals? Who’s got zines or clippings they’ll scan if you contact them? What online archives already exist for you to trawl through? That sort of thing.
Those two projects are pretty simple, but they’re important because free, open-licensed online resources will be the foundation for later projects. I don’t even know what these later projects are, yet; I just know that having the information out there will make them easier.
So, I’ll take a shot at MusicBrainz and Wikipedia regardless of whether anyone else is interested. I suspect that lots of people are interested, though, and that with a sufficient number and variety of participants there are a lot of other, more ambitious things we could try.
So I’m looking for coders, open data nerds, Wikimedians, librarians and archivists, scholars, music journalists, zinesters, fans, broadcasters, copyright law experts, free culture advocates, and past and present musicians, producers, promoters, and label folks who might be interested in this project. I’m planning to set up a mailing list and/or website for it, so leave a comment below with your email address (which will be hidden, not shown to the public) and I’ll let you know when there’s something to join.
Also, still looking for a name. Ideas welcome.
EDITED TO ADD: Please see this followup post, and subscribe to the saveaussiemusic mailing list if you’re interested in this project.
Image credit: the image used on the front page of infotrope.net to link to this post is a collage of clips from Party Fears, a Perth music zine from the 80s-90s now archived online by its creator, David Gerard.
This sounds great, and is much needed. I have a fairly good knowledge of Australian indie history and database/dynamic language programming skills (lots of Perl, some Python, less Ruby).
My name suggestion: “Wide Open Road”
I am very interested in such a project. Let me know. I spend a fair bit of time trying to get decent Wikipedia articles going for Pre-Shrunk, The Sharp and The Truth and had limited success in each. I have a few old mid 90s Beat/In*Press street-press mags too which should help (I contacted each a while back suggesting they publish a back-catalog of articles, no luck, for obvious reasons ($))
Awesome idea. Love it…
this former curator of goth.org.au (now extinct) loves this idea
I’m interested in Black Diamond Corner – Ballad of Jessie Brown, Noseknife – King Takes A Pawn, Avant Garbage – Washing Up, ? – Homicide/Division 4
I am interested! You can probably put me in the category of “fan” who is keen to research and help document this sort of history.
Brilliant idea, I’ve thought similar things myself in the past. For example, did you know one of Marcia Hines’ best albums (Ooh Child) has NEVER been reissued since 1979? This album had the classic power ballads (Something’s missing, I wanna make it with you, etc.) but the CLASSIC motown-style funk, soul, “epic disco” tracks of the height of the tradition (eg. http://www.youtube.com/user/Astraeos13?blend=23&ob=5 )are COMPLETELY UNAVAILABLE, you simply will never hear them unless you own a copy of this small printrun vinyl release from ’79 in good condition (mine has skips from scratches). This is a very important initiative, please keep it up!
keep it up but you’ll need to go back to “the loved ones” to catch the start of the arc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Loved_Ones
What? Ugh! That’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about. What a shame :(
You know, I said “indie music” above, but honestly I can’t see any reason not to include any/all lost/rare/at-risk Australian music under this project’s umbrella regardless. David pointed out that the folkies would probably love to be in on it, for instance.
Thank you! I’ll be in touch.
Ha ha O HAI. *puts your name down*
Awesome! Would love to figure out archives of Beat/Inpress. I wonder whether the State Libraries have them? Ah, yup, SLV seems to: http://bit.ly/oMrZoj … next question, of course, is whether there’s a band-by-band index to them at all.
Ooh, thanks for the name suggestion. @stokely was suggesting we look for an Australian song with “Lost” in the title, which sounds promising too.
And yay, coders. I think the early stages are likely to be more Python than anything else (at least based on available tools/libraries), but not complex Python. I’m a Perl person too but we can probably figure it out ;)
Skud, count me in the “had to find out everything I knew about music the hard way b/c my parents had no clue” category. Perhaps we should form a support group. i’m older than you so it was a given that no parent had a clue about popular music unless you were Julian Lennon or similar. :-) As a teenager in the 1970s I discovered a program on the ABC at 11 o clock at night called Room to Move by Chris Winter, which played Can, Velvet Underground and European electronica. It blew my mind and gave me the door to something better. I went on to participate in the burgeoning indie post-punk music scene in Melbourne in the early 1980s. I am doing my own digging and thinking up a series of blog posts on it – but like you, can’t think of a name, which is silly.
Here are some things that you might find useful / enjoyable if you haven’t seen / heard them already:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/hindsight/stories/2010/2946102.htm
http://wallabybeat.blogspot.com/
http://sailsofoblivion.blogspot.com/
http://bwican2.blogspot.com/
Wow, thanks so much for the links, Helen! We definitely need to find a way of sharing this stuff more… I hadn’t discovered any of those blogspot blogs yet. I’m listening to EVERYTHING on Wallaby Beat right now.
Hi, Jason Scott here, who is the textfiles.com of textfiles.com so I guess that counts for something.
First of all, do NOT put your efforts into Wikipedia – you’ll regret every minute as various bands, events, histories and stories are deleted, randomly, by people who don’t know and who have scant knowledge of AU history. It’ll be a huge waste of your time, in the long run.
A MUCH better alternative would be to run a Wiki of your own, allowing you to begin to keep track of this mass of information – then people can start adding band info, listings, and even individual files for others to work with you and improve. Require registration to edit. Add anti-spam measures.
Eventually, you’re going to run into a situation where you will archive or have a bunch of music that some label will tell you it’s illegal to have. Don’t delete it but take it from easy downloading.
And as much as I appreciate the idea, this is not really a textfiles.com – textfiles.com is just me crazily downloading anything and everything historical and adding it up, for others to regard and learn from. This sounds different.
Have you tried interlibrary loan/state libraries? Looks like some of them are available those sorts of places: http://nla.gov.au/nla.cs-ma-an14185752
Hi Jason! Thanks for your thoughts — you’re right that the match with textfiles.com is not exact, but it’s been working to get the idea across to my geek friends at least.
Wrt Wikipedia, I’m pretty experienced in Wikipedia’s notability requirements and know how to work with them, and we have some other people involved who are similarly clued up. There’s even a project there, WikiProject Australian Music that focuses on exactly this kind of stuff, so we would definitely try and work with them. In my experience, it *can* be very frustrating for people who aren’t familiar with Wikipedia’s admittedly arcane notability and citation requirements to get stuff listed there, and try not to have it deleted, but if you know how to work the system, it can definitely turn out well.
The benefit of putting stuff on Wikipedia and not on a standalone wiki is that as a major site, run by a non-profit with serious funding and infrastructure, it won’t just die and disappear when the people organising it get tired of it — and I know that I, personally, can’t guarantee the sort of longevity I’d want from this sort of project if I host it on my own. Also, coming from a professional background where I’ve recently spent a few years working on the open data project Freebase.com (recently acquired by Google), and especially with the part of Freebase that intersects with Wikipedia, I’m very much aware of how the contents of Wikipedia make their way into all sorts of other places, like Facebook entity pages for example, that contents of another wiki wouldn’t. To me, that propagation and exposure is worth the extra effort.
Thanks!
Awesome work @skud – I wonder if the national sound archive might be interested in the effort in some way? Especially given the potential loss of culture you’re flagging here.
Thanks Donna! I definitely want to connect with archivists/librarians and that’s one I had my eye on. I suspect there’s a lot of ways we could build things that link mainstream/traditional libraries and archives with community-oriented online resources. Need to do a bit more surveying of what’s out there though.
I was literally thinking about an idea much like this in the past week, however it was confined to Australian Hip Hop music and culture. I’d be keen to see where your idea heads, and perhaps combine effort and/or re-use your solution.
You know, although I said “indie music” and that has connotations of genre as well as label status, I don’t really mean to be specific to indie-rock/indie-pop/alternative type music… I don’t see any reason why this couldn’t encompass any genre, and I think it would be great if we could join forces! The main thing for me, I think, is that I’d like to focus on the independent/small-label stuff that’s pretty much inaccessible right now.
This is a brilliant idea. Clouds, Go Betweens, Hunters and Collectors, Weddings Parties Anything! Oh, I could list them all night. Well I’m not an Archivist per se, but I have been at the National Archives of Australia for quite a few years and my area of expertise is digital preservation. So please sign me up.
Oh, and if whoever owns the Triffids IP doesn’t mind, Wide Open Road would be the perfect name (nice work Mike Lynch).
Oh hai! You already know I think this is an awesome idea. But I would also like there to be some element of this project which tries to involve & empower the artists who actually created this music.
I will think more about this and keep peppering you with ideas. :D
I’m a librarian at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne. I’d love to get on board with this – the fact that the brilliant Sydney band ‘Crow’ are so hard to research is a good example of this.
Yeah, I have a few thoughts in that direction but they’re kind of ill formed. It’s complicated by the fact that many of them may be hard to find. But I’ve had great experiences working with artists on stuff like this before (for instance, getting them involved in digging up sources for Wikipedia, because they often have collections of clippings) and would love to do more like that.
You and I have talked a bit about ideas for crowdfunding re-issues. For artists who hold the rights on their own work, that could be really good. Another idea I had (actually inspired by this page on textfiles.com) is a sort of “memoirs project”.
Great to see you here, John! I’ll definitely be in touch. I have all kinds of library-related ideas I’d love to discuss with you.
Hmmm well perhaps an early task can be getting in touch with David McComb. IANAL, but I don’t think it’s actually a legal IP issue, more of a politeness thing. There’s already a cafe, a bike rental and holiday company, and a music webzine that hasn’t been updated since 2005.
Btw http://www.abc.net.au/wideopenroad/ is of potential interest!
Grepping through McFarlane, I find that a band called The Bondi Cigars released a single with a B-Side called “Long Lost Years” which would be great except I suspect nobody’s heard of it, plus, Bondi Cigars. I don’t fancy explaining that for the rest of forever.
Prize for most inappropriate “Lost”-related song title goes to the The Painters and Dockers “The Boy Who Lost His Jocks On Flinders Street Station”.
I am all for this and would like to participate.
For the kinds of reasons already mentioned above, I would rather prioritise my efforts to somewhere other than Wikipedia (although I am still happy to put the odd bit of info there).
Yeah, I hear ya. Wikipedia’s not for everyone. I’ve had good experiences with it (never had an article deleted, for one thing) but it does take a certain kind of willingness to work within their rules, and to recognise that people are *still* going to change your work after you’re done.
I’m pretty sure there’ll be lots of non-Wikipedia ways to participate, anyway. Stay tuned!
Dammit Skud, I’ve kind of got this project on the brain now. Why don’t you start a Google Group or some other kind of mailing list so we can start throwing ideas around. Actually a Google Group is probably the best idea because then you can use Google Docs.
Once we’ve set up a domain name for this it would probably be worth migrating to Google Apps for domains, so you can have doc sharing, calendaring and email @yourproject.org.au (i’ve done this before, happy to help).
I’ve got a few ideas for a database schema (or NoSQL alternative) which some of the other nerds may want to throw in their 0.02AUD on.
Honestly, because I don’t have a name for the bloody thing! As soon as one clicks, a Google Group is the first thing on my plan. Hmm, can you rename a google group? YOU CAN. OK awesome I’m gonna set that up this morning, with a holding name.