Everything is Archive on the Web. Reflections on Searching and Downloading Music

Abstract

Since the late 1960s, the concept of archive is used to analyse practices, which occur outside the realm of archives, museums, libraries and other state and private owned institutions. During the last years, the concept has been useful to understand diverse aspects of the working of the World Wide Web. The WWW, a hyper-textual, multimedia and global environment, can be thought of from two opposing perspectives. On the one hand, as a hyper-classified and meta-classified world, which has an immanent storing voracity oriented to exhaustiveness. In such sense, the WWW is a set of archives and meta-archives, with its logarithmic predictions and classification rules. On the other hand, it may be considered an environment of overabundance, which gives it users the illusion of navigating freely in a chaos, which incites us to put it in order, to classify it and to archive it. The purpose of the article consists of going deeper into these perspectives and weigh their reach in view of the different types of access which the Internet provides to the WWW when navigating is done with the objective of finding music expressions. From an interdisciplinary approach, those perspectives are questioned through the intersection of problems, which bustle in the discussions about the concept of archive, and others referring to the conditions to have access to cultural goods and services through digital communication. Access to music expressions through the web, both in their downloading or streaming modes, is problematized around archive routines, and from approaches which relativize the distinctions between consumption and production and which reflect on social life and digital information, based on the recognition of their mutual transformation.