Sunday, May 15, 2011

Library of Congress' Jukebox hits

I featured a story on the US Library Of Congress and their 100 miles of shelves last week. Now the Library and Sony have set up a National Jukebox, with 10,000 recordings for streaming. It  had one million pages views in its first 48 hours since launch.


National Jukebox website logs 1 million page views, 250,000 streams in under 48 hours (LA Times)

"The project has opened up the library’s archive with an initial posting of more than 10,000 pre-1925 recordings from the Victor record label, now under the Sony Music umbrella. The recordings span jazz, blues, ethnic folk, gospel, pop, spoken word, comedy and other genres dating to the early 20th century.

Sony has given the Library of Congress blanket permission to make the recordings accessible to the public, retaining the rights to issue any of them in the future for commercial release.

The National Jukebox site also has been a hot topic on Twitter, which shows numerous tweets about the site, including specific recordings users are flagging to their followers."

One reaction on Twitter: "I am so enamored with the National Jukebox. Where else could I listen to prohibition-era popular music online?"

Some background on the digitising process behind this digital jukebox.

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