John Peel's Record Collection
It’s being dripfed, a chunk of a letter at a time, limited to those records they can access on Spotify etc. so far - though they’re taking steps to find others. The interface is lovely. They’ll run out of funding in October, so who knows if the whole thing will go online.
Scattered thoughts:
I don’t think there’s much to be gained by treating this particular record collection as sacred: people remember Peel for his range and his approach to broadcasting, not so much his taste, and that range is more accessible than ever now. I wrote ages ago about the impossibility of Peel and all that still stands.
& would there be public funding to preserve the collections of Gilles Peterson, Dave Godin etc? People who are more specialist but go deeper into a particular area?
The stuff that made his collection unique - the genuine obscurities - and that needs exposure most is precisely the stuff that isn’t on Spotify, of course. If the collection IS an important historical artefact then the money should probably be spent on negotiating rights and ripping vinyl.
It’s taken close to a decade for this to happen - if the contents of the collection had leaked there would be multi-part torrents (continually updated and reissued with newly found material) up within a month or two. An Anonypeel Project might have digitised pretty much the whole thing by now - assuming enough people cared. Not that this wouldn’t be without massive legal and ethical issues but it’s worth throwing out since piracy culture is pretty good at ‘preserving’ and collating vast amounts of material if it wants to be.
All this makes it sound like I think the Peel Collection is a bad idea and I don’t - it’s a lovely idea, but the specific choices (some forced) in the execution do illuminate a lot of the issues around the nostalgia/sainthood of this one old gatekeeper, and the practicalities of archival projects in a crowded, pirated age.
