Beatlegmania.com - RIP?

[mitchellmichael]

I used to go to the Beatlegmania.com site quite often to look up info on titles. Seems like it is no more

[alphabeatles]

I used to go to the Beatlegmania.com site quite often to look up info on titles. Seems like it is no more

See something, save something...

[Lord Reith]

In 100 years time the first few decades of the 20th century will be a giant mystery. No letters, no hard documents, just ephemeral websites and digital files that vanished forever. Look at Geocities, MySpace... all gone. We are living through a time where nothing is permanent. They'll know less about us than we know about the people of 500 years ago.

And what will happen to the arts will be worse. The streaming companies can't keep adding millions of titles every month forever. One day they will say "Enough! No more!" and either cull old music or severely restrict new artists. With no cds or downloads, the only record of many of these albums will be on streaming servers. So when they decide to rationalise their holdings one day, giant swathes of musical history will vanish forever.

Websites like archive.org that try to preserve the past will be smashed out of existence in the courts, and then the people who did the smashing will go out of business.

History has always been about bloodshed. Except now it's digital.

[Ziggy C]

In 100 years time...

History has always been about bloodshed. Except now it's digital.

Ah, but will the digital bloodshed be done in the name of one or another religion... A "digital crusades" of sorts.
Not saying The Beatles are more popular than,... just throwing it out there. Probably could be quite the heated discussion in a different forum.

And who are we? Who will we be in a hundred years time. Most of us, avatars. Using the digital realm, which has no "gray wall" to limit us.

My avatar is perpetually 25 years old.... I did that intentionally nearly 25 years ago, not knowing where it would lead. Now I'm glad I did.

Yet you're probably onto something. The control of digital media, through streaming services and the lack of physical product, will leave us at the mercy of the one huge corporation that winds up king of the hill. Will that be Mickey Mouse? GE? Tata? Or heaven forbid, Musk?

[Lord Reith]

In 100 years time...

History has always been about bloodshed. Except now it's digital.

Ah, but will the digital bloodshed be done in the name of one or another religion... A "digital crusades" of sorts.
Not saying The Beatles are more popular than,... just throwing it out there. Probably could be quite the heated discussion in a different forum.

And who are we? Who will we be in a hundred years time. Most of us, avatars. Using the digital realm, which has no "gray wall" to limit us.

My avatar is perpetually 25 years old.... I did that intentionally nearly 25 years ago, not knowing where it would lead. Now I'm glad I did.

Yet you're probably onto something. The control of digital media, through streaming services and the lack of physical product, will leave us at the mercy of the one huge corporation that winds up king of the hill. Will that be Mickey Mouse? GE? Tata? Or heaven forbid, Musk?

I guess what I'm saying is that most of what we know about our ancestors comes from personal belongings. When people died, they left behind letters, drawings, photos, documents, whatever and some of it innevitably survived. That is history. People now are ever more intent on having no physical items. So when your relative dies unexpectedly like most people do, all their emails will be on google. Do you know your uncle's email password? Of course not, and google will never give it to you. So... all gone. Music and video... well, that's just a bunch of streaming playlists now so also gone. Books they liked? Probably a subscription to audible, or some pdfs. So... gone again. When you die now, your past ceases to exist short of your Facebook page. And the stuff that people share publicly is never the stuff that is important historically.

I can't see streaming continuing as is. A parallel is the BBC, who before the British Library were once the inadvertant custodians of most of the UK's audiovisual history. And then they just ran out of room and money, so 90% of it went. Not just tapes re-used, but actual film negatives thrown in skips and incinerated. Spotify has recently just stopped payting royalties on any songs that get less than 1000 streams a year. That's the thin end of the wedge, and I would bet my head that one day in the not too distant future the streaming companies are just going to start deleting masses of content they don't see as profitable.

The Library Of Congress is archiving Twitter, but that's just a breeding farm for trolls. Anyone in the future reading that would get a totally skewed perception of our time.

I think people like us are important. People who keep stuff on discs or hard drives, and maybe even make covers, or share it or make some attempt to ensure it survives into the future. Sure a lot of it will get discarded when we die, but it'll have a better chance of survival than a dropbox account.

When I was doing the Harry set, I was extremely conscious of this. I can imagine in the future when everyone who actually owns or knows about the material is gone, some junior intern would be assigned to compile BBC performances for the World Music Authority (joke). And they'd be forced to use youtube videos or something. Maybe that's exaggerating, but it would be a pile of crap nonetheless. As fans we have a responsibility to make sure all this uncared for stuff doesn't just vanish into the ether in 50 years time.

[Ziggy C]

I agree with what LR wrote above.

The more we keep the stuff out there, the more likely someone will have it on a drive whereby it can be shared again and again. Not in the Cloud. In fact, I abhor the Cloud for my own personal reasons, but it has everything to do with privacy, thought police, maintaining a public image that doesn't reveal the Achilles' heel, etc. So I maintain my collection, with several redundancies, on physical media.

God help us when the best quality we can hope to enjoy is available only through services such as YouTube. ....And then wiped away on a whim.
I've known for a while that most artists don't make squat through Spotify and similar services. Even when the threshold is met to receive royalties, it is a minuscule portion of an even more minuscule percentage. The odds are already against many of us.

I am also conscious of how fleeting life is, as related to our dependance and reliance on digital stuff. Once we're gone, the only vestiges that remain are through our presence in (gulp) social media. Any accounts we had online will be locked and probably erased in due time to make room. People refer to a carbon footprint. And that there is only so much space to store stuff. I take it a step further. We will learn over time that there is also a digital footprint. That there is such a thing as digital pollution and the need to make digital space available in a realm that will certainly become finite.

When my stepdaughter, Nancy, passed away in 2016 in a hang-gliding training exercise gone horribly wrong, I was extremely lucky to have guessed her iPhone password on the 2nd try. No joke. From there I was able to access her Google, FB, what have you, and had access to pretty much everything because of this. I was able to make an appropriate announcement on her FB page. I downloaded and stored her entire photo archive. Her life over the previous couple decades in pictures. My wife (Nancy's mother) is a bit more consoled that at least we have her pictures and can relive segments of her life. This is the kind of stuff that will go bye-bye the instant we succumb.

MySpace? Who?

[Kwai Chang]

KarnEvil9
Load your program
I am yourself
The graves need no flowers
Welcome back my friend
Next upon the stool...
things haven't changed that much but this digital blood will really make a mess of Jerusalem!
Bring me my bow, C-3-P-O
Luuuuuuke!
In the beginning I was the void and then
a dream within a dream.
Now, I'm a frigment of the last things I said around Alexa...
Can deep:Twerkin be far 'behind'?
Sorry!
That ain't funny!
Virtually Unfunny:NOW!(at the App)
You know the rest.
KC

[skynet]

'We are the keepers of the memories, a sacred trust given to us by those who have journeyed on.'

~ Glenda Stansbury

I guess that sentence pretty much apply to us, thanks to you Lord and people like you that gave us plenty of updates, and is our task to find a way to preserve them, me as many more here do the same, have several media redundancies in HQ of our digital archives, but some of us like me, still try to preserve physical media, such as vinyl, tapes, video, i will try to pass it to my next generation, with little hope unfortunately, but expecting that someone with enough care passthrough all these joyous recordings and material, we are the archivist in fact, not even the big companies, that withheld lots of material that we do not know away in their vaults, with the expectation to make a profit of them in the future, but in true is a small percentage of people like us, who really care about this material to be in the known

Yes the Beatles will live forever, and maybe for some is a controversy for discussion in other forum, but YES, they are more frickin' popular than a figure that lost a popularity contest against a known popular thief around 2000 years ago ("... I never said better or great..." )

[Kando]

A lot of good insights posted here folks. Keep up the good work. Sad to see another useful site disappear.