The Roots Music Archive Project

Much of roots music’s evolution coincided with the development of widespread mediums of communication: radio, television, and the internet. Because of this, many incredible moments have been captured and recorded.

However, all of these recordings, clips, photos, writings, and other artifacts are decentralized and spread around the physical and virtual world. The goal of this project is to organize all that’s been captured of this music from its very source; not writing about it, not commenting about it, but instead making the artifacts themselves available to the public for entertainment, discovery, and gaining a deeper understanding of how it’s all linked together.

More interesting than the artifacts themselves is the relationships between them. One large facet of this project is to provide an understanding of these relationships.

Another goal of this archive is to be extremely user-friendly. It should be easy to understand and easy to navigate.

One challenge of this archive project is the server space required to host all of this media (especially the thousands of hours of footage) and getting the rights to some of that footage. It would likely be a collaborative effort that involves embedded external links to the sources.

I am not interested in monotizing this. The user experience should not involve advertisers or a paywall.

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Artifacts assorted in chronological order

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A map of all connected information

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An example of a musician’s place in the map