British Library's world music archive goes online for free. Amounts to around 28,000 recordings dating from 1898 onwards, according to The Guardian this equates with "about 2,000 hours of singing, speaking, yelling, chanting, blowing, banging, tinkling and many other verbs associated with what is a uniquely rich sound archive" The weirdest one? - possibly the recording of an Assamese woodworm munching its way through a window frame in the dead of night.......
posted by MajorDundee on Sep 4, 2009 - 31 comments

Pilgrim Productions Presents: Voices Across America, an archive of gospel music in a variety of genres, submitted for free play and download by church groups and folk and traditional groups across the country and beyond. Style, age, and quality vary greatly, but fans of noncommercial music will enjoy hunting for the gems of blues, Cajun, bluegrass, choral, shapenote, country, vintage, and mountain gospel and more.
posted by Miko on May 24, 2009 - 15 comments

Daft Punk revealed in bootleg video at the 1996 Even Further festival. [more inside]
posted by loquacious on May 10, 2009 - 31 comments

The Gramophone Archive is a (free) searchable database containing every issue of Gramophone from April 1923 to the latest issue.
posted by Gyan on Feb 15, 2009 - 4 comments

The Historic American Sheet Music archive at the Duke University Library has over 3000 pieces published in the United States available online, from the 1850s up to 1920. Composers represented include well-known names such as Scott Joplin, Irving Berlin, and John Philip Sousa. All the music is now in the public domain, and may be printed and performed freely. [Note: Language or stereotypes may occasionally be NSFW.]
posted by Upton O'Good on Jul 22, 2008 - 7 comments

WFMU's Free Music Archive, "an online digital library of music that will allow music fans, webcasters and podcasters to listen, download, and stream for free, with no restrictions, registration or fees. And it will all be legal." Still pre-launch, but there's already quite a bit of music available on the site, including a sampler CD.
posted by cog_nate on Jul 15, 2008 - 18 comments

The University of South Carolina recently completed an ambitious survey of all medieval texts in the state for an exhibit at the university library. All the works were scanned and archived electronically. However, not only can you view the texts online, you can hear the university's chorus sing (MP3) the musical manuscripts. [more inside]
posted by 1f2frfbf on Mar 18, 2008 - 8 comments

A massive collection of live DJ and PA sets of electronic music sorted by year and genre. Enjoy.
(Coral Cache link. Please use this to help archive and propagate the files.)
posted by loquacious on Dec 31, 2006 - 15 comments

Head Back to Mono in 32k at the rineke.net records archive, where a rather consistent curator has digitized a goody chunk of his record collection. It's posted in more-or-less every iteration imaginable. Observe the linked scans (1 mb page, careful!) of the covers (also in multiple resolutions up to full-size). Note the records themselves, in sleeve or out, depending. Most especially, savor the clean, low-res mono mp3s that cry out to be played through the dashboard speakers of a 1967 Dodge Dart.

Bonus Big Beat Bonanza: The site's author is also behind the similarly detailed archive of shows by ex-WFMU dj The Hound, from 1987 through 1995, heavy on the rare regional sides beloved of certain of my pals down New Orleans way.

Last, but not least, rineke.net hosts the adventures of a platoon of Tux clones, sealing my geek admiration for the overseer of the site. There's more, of course. My propeller beanie's off to you, sir, and long may you wave, or particle, as is your choice and preference.

(Permission was sought and granted to post this, as I feard for the site's bandwidth. Have at it, Mefites!
posted by mwhybark on Aug 12, 2004 - 7 comments

delenda mp3.com est "Vivendi Universal recently sold the MP3.com domain to CNet. However, they're not selling the approximately one million songs on the archive. (recorded by over 250,000 artists) Instead, they're simply destroying it as of December 3. MP3.com's founder and former CEO, Michael Robertson, is pleading with Vivendi to allow the Internet Archive to preserve the songs." (via Slashdot)
posted by kablam on Nov 23, 2003 - 16 comments

The Scopitone was a French video jukebox that made its debut in 1960 and was imported into the US in 1964. Although they usually featured high production values, catchy melodies, and lots of gratuitous cheesecake, the singers were often relative unknowns and the music was square even by the standards of the day. Consequently, they never caught on in a big way outside of Europe, and many of the original Scopitone jukeboxes and films were destroyed. Fortunately for us, a few Scopitone enthusiasts have catalogued the songs, scanned the advertisements, and even preserved a few Quicktime clips of the original French and American Scopitone films.
posted by MrBaliHai on May 4, 2003 - 9 comments