ABSTRACT
Popular music archives, heritage and histories are emerging online from a diverse set of practices, exhibiting a prodigious variety of reference points and modes of memory making. On one hand, and alongside tributes to specific artists, sites such as ‘Orgy in Rhythm’ or ‘Dr. Schluss’ Garage of Psychedelic Obscurities’ are dedicated to the retrieval and documentation of particular styles of music and historical moments. Celebrating renowned or obscure bands and their recording histories by turn, such sites are sometimes organized around singles and albums, uploaded as digital sound files for sharing with fellow aficionados alongside band images, discographies and other documents. On the other hand there are many sites that are notable for the geographical specificity of their historical purview. These sites have as their focus the popular music heritage of countries such as Hungary or Australia or particular cities like Budapest, Wollongong or Brisbane. While some of these projects may be presented in purpose-built websites, many are characterized by a use of ready-made social media templates from WordPress, Blogger, Wikis or Facebook for instance. Actively building communities of interest, sites like Calyx, which concentrates on the music of Canterbury (see Bennett, 2002), or the Facebook group dedicated to Glasgow’s Apollo venue are a focus for testimonies about music experiences in which participants post personal photographs of bands, scans of fliers, magazine, and fanzine pages amongst other kinds of ephemera.
