It’s great to own music in physical formats. That way you can play the song you like whenever you want in any setting of choice. This also means you can’t have all the music that’s out there. Also, music is about shared listening, meaning you listen to a record with a few friends and then share thoughts about it. Almost any music streaming service can put you closer to almost all the popular songs that are available, though some musicians are still holding out. But it’s recordings that once appeared on 78rpms that’s largely missing from the streaming world.
Academic journals and books have become more accessible to people around the world because of digitisation and helping achieve something similar with 78rpm records is the Great 78 Project.
There is something called the Internet Archive, which provides free public access to collections of digitised materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images and millions of books. The Internet Archive has been working with in partnership with George Blood LP since 2016 to digitise thousands of 78rpm records.
Four tonearm 78rpm turntable of George Blood LP Sourced by the correspondent
Thanks to the Great 78 Project, over 250,000 records have been preserved. Recently, the archive posted a Twitter thread about how each record is cleaned and filed away. “There’s a half-century of 78rpm recordings (1898-1950s) at risk of being lost, never heard again in the digital era. Our goal is to save them all…. After scanning 250,000 sides, we’ve found 80 per cent of these #78s were produced by the ‘Big Five’ labels (Decca, Columbia, Victor, Capitol and RCA Victor. but along the way, we’ve uncovered 1,700 other music labels plus some pretty beautiful picture discs.”
According to The Verge, The records are cleaned on a machine that sprays distilled water on the surface, followed by a vacuum arm sucking up the water and dirt that has built up in the grooves. Finally, the discs are photographed.
The 78rpms in the archive are mostly made from sheelac, that is, beetle resin, and were the brittle predecessors to the LP (microgroove) era. If you have time to spare, head over to @great78project on Twitter where recordings keep getting posted almost every other hour. Or you can head over to the Internet Archive and then narrow down the search using year, genre and artiste parameters.
