Kindle libraries; troves of infinitely streamable songs on Spotify and Apple Music; scores of shows and films on Netflix, Max, and Hulu. Even the Criterion Collection is online now. Cultural archives now live on server farms, so much so that the value of physical media seems ever-shifting. While there’s some benefit to it—the ineffable experience of flipping through a book, owning DVDs of your favorite show to watch when it disappears from streaming—the logistical issues involved in preserving massive archives of these things feels astronomical. Especially now, when many shows, comics, and albums aren’t even released as Blu-rays, bound editions, or LPs.
While physical media faces an increasingly uncertain and unsympathetic future, its defenders do all they can to protect what they see as an invaluable resource. Nowhere is that more evident than at the ARChive of Contemporary Music (ARC), a New York-based nonprofit that keeps and maintains the largest popular music collection in the world.
Encompassing more than 3 million recordings, including the personal holdings of collectors like Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, businessman Zero Freitas, late director Jonathan Demme, and A-Square Record label founder Jeep Holland, the ARC holds an impressive array of everything from signed LPs to blues 78s to Brazilian and Haitian music. It’s also taken in recordings, books, and papers from music icons like David Byrne and journalist Jon Pareles, and reportedly holds some of the world’s biggest collections of Broadway, African, punk, jazz, country and western, folk, hip hop, and experimental recordings. It’s become an important resource for researchers doing work in music history, graphic design, or cultural heritage—and it’s in jeopardy.
Created in New York City in the mid-’80s, the ARC was originally envisioned by founders B. George and the late David Wheeler, an author and record collector, as a way to help preserve the legacy of an industry that, at that time, frankly hadn’t done a very good job of keeping track of its own history. Sessions deteriorated and went missing over time, private pressings of LPs went into personal collections and never reappeared, and entire label catalogs were lost to moldy basements and unsentimental relatives.
As the ARC grew, it pushed out of the boundaries of its previous spaces, landing three years ago in a private commercial space in upstate New York held by hotelier André Balazs. Now, the ARC says it has to leave that space because, unbeknownst to them and to Balazs, the building they’re occupying—known as “The Piggery”—is zoned for agriculture, a designation that can’t be changed. They’ve already received a million-dollar donation from a longtime supporter who’d love to see them move into a new space, but no one else has come out of the woodwork to chip in.
B. George, an artist and record label founder who used his own 47,000-disc collection to seed the ARC, says the organization is looking for a benefactor like James Smithson, who donated the equivalent of $500,000 in gold sovereigns to the United States to found the Smithsonian, despite never visiting America. ARC, he says, needs someone “who can see the value in what we’re doing and who has the foresight to push America to do something that they should have always been doing all along.”
Musicians share B. George’s enthusiasm for preservation. “No other organization is doing what the ARC is doing,” says B-52’s frontman Fred Schneider, who sits on the institution’s board of advisers alongside Richards, Nile Rodgers, Todd Rundgren, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Simon. Saying he’s been a “record nut all his life,” Schneider adds that part of the reason he sees value in the museum is because of what’s not on streaming services. “Not only do the streaming services sound like crap, but probably 90 percent of [recorded] music will never be on them,” he says. “A lot of the great music that’s on CD will almost certainly never make it to streaming.”
George points to the Beatles as an example. It took years for the Fab Four’s music to show up on Apple Music (then iTunes), and other artists have ended up in similar disputes over distribution rights. Recorded music “is a commodity that’s bought and sold, and so whoever owns it has the ability to make it available,” George says. “We’re just trying to offer a space where, regardless of whatever circumstance, that music might still be there for at least scholars to look at.”
Though the ARC has digitized at least some of its collection through the Internet Archive, George notes that he sees inherent limitations to that program and the digitization of music in general. “People download a song, but they don’t know which version of the song it is,” he explains. “Take, for instance, ‘Love Supreme’ by John Coltrane. There are a lot of versions and a lot of templates, and if you don’t know the context or which album it’s on, it matters. Online, a lot of that information is very hidden or it’s just not there.”
You also lose out, George notes, on ephemeral material that might have come with a record, whether it’s that elaborate 20-page booklet tucked inside the front cover of a CD from the ’90s or wry or interesting liner notes from some obscure African or punk LP.
Migrating digitized material can be a problem too, George says. While moving a massive box of records—or a warehouse of 3 million of them—is certainly no picnic, that kind of physical material can be hard to ignore. If someplace like a university starts a digitization program for someone’s papers or recorded work, they might end that work when a grant or allotted funds run out. At that point, George says, you have to worry about not just where that material goes, but also how you might be able to play it in the future.
Vinyl records are likely to always be playable, but as tech companies come and go, access to a lot of digital archives can feel precarious. “We joke with the people at the Internet Archive about who’s going to last longer, and we’re all pretty sure it’s us,” George quips. “If you’ve got a bicycle wheel, a rubber band, a bundle of sewing needles, and a cone of paper, you’ll always be able to play an LP, but you can’t make a chip at home.”
Rodgers calls the ARC “a hell of a thing to look at,” in part because of its scale but mostly because of how the physical archive really rewards discovery. It’s one thing to plug a keyword into a search engine and find something you’ve targeted, but it’s another thing entirely to pull a record from a shelf based on some artwork and discover your new favorite song.
While the ARC focuses on material recorded after the release of 45s, the collection does have a substantial amount of 78s, in part because, as George puts it, “we’re the dumpster of pop music.” As archivists have gone through the material in the collection piece by piece, they’ve made some interesting discoveries, whether it’s tracking down long-lost Bert Sommer records for Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock or realizing the reach of someone like Aileen Stanley, a parlor singer who it turns out actually sold more records than Enrico Caruso, who’s long been held as the first million-selling recording artist. “She did better than Caruso,” George says, “and now, no one knows who she is.”
“Things come and go, and there are a million reasons why,” George continues. “All we can do is try and preserve them so that, someday, someone will be able to come along and have an opportunity to build upon what we once knew.”
The ARC has given itself until Valentine’s Day to come up with the additional funds it needs for a new space. Though no one has come through yet, the group has solicited everyone from Quincy Jones to Discogs. “There’s interest, but no one’s actually said yes,” George says. “We’re still in limbo, and that’s really difficult. If we can’t get the money by February, we’ll have to move everything out and put it in storage. We’re kind of shocked that no one wants to put their name on a building to preserve the music, though. The more places that music is safe, the better chance it has of surviving.”