Where Have All the Bob Seger Albums Gone?
This was why <i>what.cd</i> was sublime (and its loss a travesty I haven&#x27;t yet recovered from) -- it was a peerlessly extensive archive with uncompromisingly strict curation of metadata and content alike.<p>Wanton downloading was not tolerated; it wasn&#x27;t a site meant to avoid paying for music; it was a project meant to build an archive -- that there was no payment involved was incidental. You had to contribute to download: either you got buffer via leaving your torrent client on with a fast internet connection, or you got buffer by filling requests (people could pledge some of <i>their</i> buffer to an unfulfilled request to make filling difficult-to-find requests it more attractive). If you wanted to download something and you didn&#x27;t have enough buffer, you&#x27;d either have to wait for your existing stash to generate buffer (via other people requesting it from you) or you&#x27;d go in the &quot;requests&quot; tab and buy&#x2F;lend&#x2F;obtain and rip the CD in question to fill the request. Between the passionate userbase and this incentive system, over its 9 years, there were a <i>lot</i> of out-of-print albums digitised and distributed for the first time. I spent money on it (for CDs that nobody had uploaded yet) but for the value that it offered me, I&#x27;d be willing to pay a <i>lot</i> for access to a similar cooperative archival-quality music library not subject to <i>any</i> copyright&#x2F;licensing issues.<p>To see albums fall out of print and become obscure and inaccessible is heart-rending, given that <i>we have the means</i> to archive all of this. It is even more tragic because we won&#x27;t have forever -- physical media degrades and people die (and their collections get lost or thrown away). To quote Pastor Manul Laphroaig from PoC||GTFO,<p>&gt; Bitrot will burn libraries with merciless indignity that even Pets Dot Com didn’t deserve. Please mirror—don’t merely link!—pocorgtfo13.pdf and our other issues far and wide, so our articles can help fight the coming flame deluge.<p>I feel similarly about libraries of music.