Music

You can listen to more than 50,000 songs from the early 20th century here

For the record(s)

22.08.2017

By Su Fen Tan

You can listen to more than 50,000 songs from the early 20th century here

Now that slight crackle and hiss that come with putting on a record on the turntable is probably a distant memory, seeing that it’s not the most accessible way of listening to music in this day and age, and fading away with the old technology is the music that came on records. But there was a time when 78rpm records were the way to tune in to music, and that’s where The Great 78 Project steps in—to save as much music as they can from obscurity.

 

The Great 78 Project, the latest endeavour by Internet Archive, is a community project for the preservation, research and discovery of 78rpm records. To date, they have digitised more than 25,000 78rpm records, featuring around half a million songs on their non-profit digital library. In digitising the records, they don’t remaster them, so the recordings have that real nostalgic imperfection and surface noise of the original media.

 

Curious to see what music you can find on the library? Stream them for free here.

 

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