When Your Work Disappears Completely

Thoughts On Digital Preservation - Plus: Everyone’s a Musician… Are We At Critical Mass?

Jun 02, 2025

Howdy! This is installment #7 in our 🦺Under Construction🚧 series. We’re just a month away from launch, so keep an eye on July! We’ll kick off our official newsletter the first week of July, and our podcast, The J-Card, will debut on Thursday, July 3rd.

In today’s newsletter:

When Your Work Disappears Completely 😶‍🌫️
Hope You Like It: Stories About Working Artists 🎥
Anyone Can Play Guitar (And Distribute It Globally) 🗺️

😶‍🌫️ When Your Work Disappears Completely

Along with this Tape Club, we both make music as well – here’s Graham’s, and here’s mine. Of course, when you’re about to release new music, you usually try to figure out some sort of rollout plan, whether that’s looking for a blog to premiere the single, doing an interview with someone on Substack, etc.

In my case, I’m about to release another album later this summer, so we’ve started planning the release, and that means I had to find some old press snippets. Well, while looking for some of those, I noticed some old articles about some of my past albums were gone and some old links were totally dead. That got me thinking about the importance of digital preservation.

Obviously, we have amazing organizations like The Internet Archive handling as much as they can, and fighting tooth and nail to survive, but at the end of the day, with how much “content” (I hate that word) is being published every second, how quickly programming/communication standards are changing, and how few publishers truly own their platforms, it’s no surprise that we lose tons of media every year.

For my day job, I work in video production, and I’ve worked on so many projects that have been scrubbed from the internet and will never see the light of day. I’ve always kept final exports of the videos because to me, it’s important to show what sort of past work I’ve done.

For example, I remember working on some videos I was pretty proud of for a major vodka brand. Years later, I had another opportunity to work on something spirit-related, so I needed to gather any related past work. Of course, all those old videos had been scrubbed from existence, but luckily I had my copies. Yes, those one-minute long vodka cocktail recipe videos might not have really mattered to the company that posted them, but they definitely mattered to me.

Last year, the MTVNews.com archives were completely wiped. Basically two decades of media went down the drain. Maybe it was to save server space, maybe it was a compatibility issue moving forward, but the reality is that tons of work disappeared, no matter if that work was “good” or not.

MySpace famously lost all their media that was uploaded pre-2016. One could argue that MySpace was well past its prime at that point, but I’d be willing to bet there were at least a handful of folks who were sad to lose that stuff.

When the day inevitably comes that Spotify is no longer “too big to fail” and is sold for parts, I wonder what’ll happen to their infrastructure and how it’ll impact the media landscape. What do you think will happen? Leave us a comment.

🎥 Hope You Like It: Stories About Working Artists

When I made PLAY BY EAR, my documentary about working-class musicians and how to build art communities, I was able to screen it at a few film festivals. At one of these festivals, I was lucky to meet Justin MacFayden, the creator of Hope You Like It.

Hope You Like It is a documentary series that’s focused on the lives and stories of working artists who Justin comes across. Check out the trailer for season two of Hope You Like It below, and go subscribe to the YouTube channel if you get a chance!

📈 Help Out By Sponsoring The Tape Club

If you want to help out a small-time art project, support DIY creatives, and shine a small spotlight on physical media, get in touch!

Sponsor Us!

🗺️ Anyone Can Play Guitar (And Distribute It Globally)

As we’ve been nearing our launch, we’ve been gathering tracks for our quarterly mixtapes. While we have a decent amount of friends and folks within a degree who make tunes and could contribute, we’re also always looking for contributors from outside our circles.

Which is what led me to making a post on Reddit asking for submissions. As of my writing this newsletter, here’re some quick insights about that post:

The initial call for submissions was posted 4 days ago.
In those 4 days, it has been viewed over 21,000 times.
There have been over 300 comments, leaving links to their music.

Keep in mind, this is for one single post, in one single subreddit (for those unfamiliar, that’s what they call topic-specific forums). And beyond that, this is for our silly, little, pre-launch Tape Club that has basically no audience right now. Literally, we have 60 subscribers. (Thank you, btw, we love you, no shade, you’re early, etc.)

I’m beyond grateful for all the artists who submitted their music. There were submissions across many genres from all over the world by people from tons of different backgrounds. While the amount of music sent in might be overwhelming, it’s pretty awesome to know that recording and distributing music is so accessible/democratized. (Of course, the democratization of access to media creation and publishing poses its own set of new challenges, but for now, let’s focus on the positives.)

To round out the newsletter, here’re three tunes I really loved from all the submissions we received. Enjoy!

🫶 Your Support…

We sincerely thank you for being a part of the Tape Club. Your support doesn’t go unnoticed, especially in these early stages.

We’re currently seeking music submissions for the first tape. If you’re interested in submitting or know anyone who might be, here’s the submission form: https://forms.gle/Mc7En6K8Tb2BbgxJA

We’re also happy to hear your general thoughts and ideas. There’s a form for those, too: https://forms.gle/nTgxrqL6oLfVKms27

Thanks again, and talk to you soon!

-RDTC