Recently I was contacted by someone asking for audio from one of the rare records I have in my collection. The way I understood the question was that they wanted the audio to be available online so that people could hear it. I went ahead and posted it at dollarcountry.org (hear it here: https://dollarcountry.org/items/show/30693)
After this they responded asking if they could post it on youtube. I have yet to answer, partly because it made me think about why I stopped posting music to youtube, partly because I know I tend to get deep in the weeds thinking about matters like this and sometimes people don’t want that amount of explanation, and partly because I knew my response would make me sound like a wet blanket. The very basic answer is that I didn’t want Dollar Country’s digitization work to continue to be added to the portfolio of a private business. Beyond that I know that Google, owner of youtube, has contracts with the defense department and I didn’t want DC’s archiving work to in any way (even the tiniest amount) be associated with war funding. This question made me start to evaluate not only youtube, but how we, as a society, have come to donate so much time, effort, and work to gigantic corporations (meta [instagram/facebook], google, twitter etc) that create monetary and personal gain for some of the wealthiest organizations on the planet.
Early Youtube
I was around when youtube started, I remember hearing about it for the first time and being kind of flabbergasted by it’s library, but also underwhelmed by it’s quality. Before youtube it was fairly hard to get video online. You had to either download it or have it be self hosted, but streaming wasn’t really a thing yet. TV shows weren’t on demand. I had music videos of bands saved on my computer so I could watch them, some that I had to leave my computer on all night to download because of early 2000s download speeds and limits. So it was amazing to be able to find these videos, but also the quality was very low, so I still preferred the copies on my computer. Another thing I realized early on is that streaming is great, but what happens if a video gets taken down? Then you don’t have it, and I’m a collector, I like to have things when I need them.
Fast forward a couple years and I was at a small party and the music was provided completely by youtube open on a desktop computer. Before this I had really only seen it as a video website, but now people were simply playing Joni Mitchell songs from it. There wasn’t even a video, just a static image. This was probably 2006 or 2007. When Dollar Country started in 2016 youtube was already full of obscure music digitized from vinyl, not nearly as much as today, but if you found an obscure record for sale you could often find it there.
Combine this with the fact that facebook had expanded to anyone over the age of 13 in 2006 and myspace started in 2003 and you suddenly have access to an absolutely mind bending (for 2006 people) amount of things and other people. I doubt I can do it justice by explaining it here, but imagine if you could only see media that was on TV or that you or a friend physically held. It seems incredibly limited by today’s standards.
What Service Does Youtube Offer?
Now we take for granted that nearly everything is available online when we want it. When we can’t find something on youtube it’s a bummer, an outlier in our experience. This is the service that youtube provides right? Well, kind of. The thing is that they only provide the service, the media that we watch on youtube is almost entirely provided by other people, often as work that is volunteered even though we don’t normally see it that way. When you digitize an obscure record and upload it to youtube you have just volunteered your time to a company that has a profit of hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
But I wonder why do we do this? Because that’s not how it’s framed. For example: I upload videos of how to digitize records or clean records to instagram and youtube because my goal is to help other humans, it just so happens that google and meta allow me to get those videos to the biggest audiences. So when we post we think about creating a knowledge base for each other or making other people laugh, or maybe being able to make a little income for ourselves. I think this is excellent and amazing, and in many ways a shining light for humanity, that we want to share these things and help each other. I won’t deny the amazing things this has done for us. When you need to replace your car headlight you can find more than enough video tutorials. We get to see amazing slices of life from people who post their own videos that we wouldn’t have seen in 2001. The benefits are many.
The problem is that this public knowledge base we’re building isn’t public, it’s owned by someone. Ideally it would be publicly owned, or not owned at all. Not only is it owned by people, but it’s made people who are not us absolutely unfathomably rich to the point where they could afford to completely fund the work of hundreds of archivists and archives if they wanted to, but they don’t because we offer the work to them for free. In the early internet it felt more like a community project where we uploaded stuff for each other, then social media platforms told us that we were building our own brand by posting to their sites, and in the end we were building theirs. Sure, we built some of our own along the way, but the funnels mostly went to the owners of the platforms.
Would you submit your art, your architecture, your project to someone else to put in their portfolio to sell? Probably not, but this is what we’ve done and continue to do for giant corporations.
Also, I get it. When DC started I wanted to post stuff to youtube so people would find Dollar Country and think “wow this guy has some really cool rare records!” So I’m privileged that I don’t feel like I have to post to youtube to get people to know about me.
A Quick Note About Ownership
Before I get to the end I wanted to mention that I don’t own the music in the archives. I own the discs, but the music belongs to the makers of it. However I do think that archivists play an important part in the life cycle of the music and deserve to be compensated for it. My hunch is that many people post old music to youtube because they see it as a public service and want to share their collections. I ssume they also want to offer it for free because they don’t own it. But you do own your time.
When I talk about how I would like to be compensated for archiving it’s not about gatekeeping the music or feeling like I own it. It’s that it takes time, expertise, and gear to do. Even the most basic digitization takes a computer, a turntable, digital editing know-how, and the better part of an hour. It reminds me of something I heard painters say about the price of art. The reason a painting can be so expensive is because you’re paying for the work the artist put in over many years to get to the point where they could make the painting you love enough to want to purchase.
When a family member contacts me about their relatives record and I offer them a digital copy of it it seems like a very simple interaction. Behind that interaction is often years of unseen work. For that person to have found the record I had to build my database website, and for that record to be there I had to find it and buy it. But when we just see a song on youtube we don’t think about the unseen work of the people who realized it was worth saving.
Yeah OK Get To The Point
Remember when I said
I have yet to answer, partly because it made me think about why I stopped posting music to youtube, partly because I know I tend to get deep in the weeds thinking about matters like this and sometimes people don’t want that amount of explanation, and partly because I knew my response would make me sound like a wet blanket.
I think I’ve gotten pretty deep in the weeds with it. In the end my real answer is “why would I volunteer work to a company that can more than afford to pay me for it? Not only could they pay for it but it would be the equivalent of pocket change for them if they did.” I know that posting to youtube is the accepted norm and going aginst that makes me a wet blanket, I know that people just want to search on one website and find music and that any extra effort is seen as too much. I know the people who hit me up for audio to post on youtube are just trying to share it or build their own youtube channel, they’re not being rude, but at some point I feel like we, as a society, need to realize our worth and stop volunteering our work like this. It has become the norm to volunteer for huge corporations because we’ve been told it’s for our own benefit somehow.
So I stopped doing that. You don’t have to, I’m just sharing my thoughts. But I do want to speak to you, the person ripping vinyl and putting it on youtube. Value yourself, Value that you valued this music enough to save it and to spend your time to digitizing and sharing. You and your taste are important and unique.
The Future I Hope For
This is going to make me sound old and stale, but I miss the days of finding music on website and blogs instead of all in one place. The search for things often gives us appreciation for it, and in a world where music has been so devalued that spotify doesn’t even pay the majority of artists on it (while they take home billions) I think appreciation of music should be built up.
The music I share on DC is just as available as if it was on youtube. It’s just not on youtube, but if you search for it it’s on my website for free to listen to. You can send me an email and I’ll digitize things and share them ( researchrequest@dollarcountry.org ). Because something isn’t on one of the huge sites doesn’t mean you can’t listen to it. You often just have to do a quick internet search to find more.
My hope for the future is that we go back to having people share things on their own sites instead of all being volunteer workers for billion dollar companies. Finding curators who share music and tell the story of it instead of youtube videos. Let those curators show you new things instead of an algorithm built to make your browsing habits profitable.
If you got this far then share a good blog or record you hear about somewhere besides youtube!