Jason Scott Is Archiving Thousands of Hip-Hop Mixtapes ⇥ ascii.textfiles.com

Jason Scott:

There’s parody, there’s aggrandizement, and there’s every attempt to draw in the listeners in what is a pretty large pile of material floating around. I can listen to some of it, but not really much before I ‘get it’.

But it’s not about my personal preferences in music – it’s about the fact this whole set of material has meaning, reality and relevance to many, many people.

The web is old enough that links regularly rot,¹ but young enough that we haven’t quite figured out how to deal with preserving this data. The Internet Archive is an invaluable resource that comfortably, if unofficially, fills this gap.