Brazilian Music Day, Sept. 7, 2012. The ARChive of Contemporary Music

the ARChive + Brazilian Music Day

ARC is the largest collection of popular music in the world. We have more than two million recordings, and this is our 27th year. I'm B.George and I'm the co-founder and director. The head archivist is Fred Patterson who's been here ten years. Our newest archivist is Quinn MacRorie, who oversees our scanning projects. That's it - plus an incredibly wonderful, ever changing cast of interns and volunteers.

We don't do entertainment, and by that I mean we are not a presenting organization. We don't have an acquisitions budget. And we don't take city, state or federal funds. We get by through the generous support of our Boards, a foundation, music research fees and a sale we hold twice a year to get rid of our third copies of recordings. Like Noah, we save two of everything.

What we do is preserve commercially released popular music, every genre and style, from every culture in the world. We do that pretty well. To grow our collection, and keep from growing dull, we launched a focused annual focus on music. The twist, the gist, is to ask a great many people to do just a bit, using the Internet to scoop it up.

Last April Muslim Music Day looked at the borderless expanse of Islam. Brazil's a little easier to corral, but you need an awfully big rope. When we're done we hope that an academic institution will take over this site and keep it up to date. We're moving on to the sub-continent next year -
India Music Day, October 10, 2013.

We're not experts, but we're plenty interested. So forgive our mistakes and correct them for us. We welcome your help and contributions. Send along info, metadata, releases and donations if you're able.