Introduction

In Global Music Report 2017: Annual State of the Industry, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry commented on the substantial growth in revenue for digital sales of recorded music and noted the shift in the recorded music industry of the last two decades as ‘one of transformation: from physical to digital; downloads to streaming; ownership to access’ (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, 2017: 6). As the access and consumption of music has increasingly moved into the online environment, the number of individuals, communities and organisations who have come together to capture, share, preserve and celebrate a broad range of popular music histories, heritage and culture in participatory online archives has also proliferated.

Taking advantage of bespoke platforms such as Wordpress and Blogger are sites dedicated to a diverse range of music histories and heritage. Some are focused on specific places, such as Pompey Pop (the city of Portsmouth in the UK), Archive of Southeast Asian Music or the Manchester Digital Music Archive. Others focus on broader music culture. For example, 45 Sleeves, hosted by Big Boopa, is concerned with documenting and matching 45rpm records to their sleeves and the labels they were issued on. Kill Your Pet Puppies was created in order to document and make available the fanzine of the same name and has developed into a cultural archive of the UK anarcho-punk milieu; and Tape Attack is dedicated to German cassette culture of the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps even more prolific are the actions of individuals who utilise social media, crowdsourcing and user-generated platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, YouTube and Historypin to capture and celebrate popular music culture and memory in unintentional archives (Baker and Collins, 2015). Estimated to number into the thousands, if not tens of thousands, of groups, engaging hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of individuals in communities of interest, these activities produce prodigious amounts of digital artefacts alongside the vernacular knowledge and memories of their participants. Topics range from the Texas music scene (for example, Texas Music History), to The Smiths posters (for example, The Smiths in posters), to more general music history (for example, Classic Alternative @altclassic).