PCP#591… Pining for the Fjords….

I’ve just found out that the Free Music Archive is shutting down.  They commented on Monday 5th November:

We regret to inform you that due to a funding shortage, the FMA will be closing down later this month. The future of the archive is uncertain, but we have done everything we can to ensure that our files will not disappear from the web forever. The full audio collection will be backed up and available at https://archive.org/details/freemusicarchive (some of the collection is already there; feel free to go browse).

We are also partnering with Archive-It to preserve a current copy of the site’s public pages in the Wayback Machine. FMA audio will also be added to the Creative Commons project CC Search, a search engine for the Commons, later in 2019.

The site may go down as early as November 9th, so now’s the time to download your playlists, favorite songs, and do whatever personal archiving you need.

Want to help us preserve the FMA or make your own custom FMA collection? You have two good options:

1) Go to https://webrecorder.io/, make a free account and record some browsing sessions. You can save pages, search results, and much more using this tool (I’ve already done some serious browsing & recording – check out my collections here). If you want to share your sessions with us, we can compile a crowdsourced repository. The site may go down at the end of this week, so if you are going to do this, please do it soon.

2) Go to the Wayback Machine homepage and plug in the URLs you want to save. These are then archived for the public to use. There are browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox that make this super easy. Some pages are saved already, but many of them are outdated, so save away!

Share this information far and wide; we don’t want our hard work (and amazing collection) to be forgotten. There is hope that we can find a new parent organization to help us continue the project, but for now, we must take a break and figure out the best course to proceed. We are interested in hearing from anyone who wants to offer web development help, funding, nonprofit status, or has other suggestions. There is a comment form below for this purpose; please put your feedback there.

Thanks, most of all, to you – our amazing community! From the volunteers who helped us maintain the site and bring new artists on board, to the curators and bands whose contributions diversified our collections, to our funders, to the folks that used the site everyday and made it the legendary corner of the web that it truly was. It was an amazing nine years, and we are extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished together.

Since then the site has now done dark.

Update: Closing Date Pushed to Dec 1

Many of the music resources I used were from the FMA, although many were cross referenced ar archive.org. There’s less and less places now where Creative Commons licensed music can be uploaded for free and can be found my music lovers.

I guess we should be grateful that other resources still exist.

Thanks to Dave Lee for updating me on this.

Update: FMA’s Future