Tag: music

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Ancient Web: Perfect Sound Forever Was Calling Out Bad Songs in 1997

Before reaction videos, ranked-list factories, and social feeds turned musical disagreement into an industrial process, an online music magazine could simply ask people to explain which songs they thought were terrible. Perfect Sound Forever did exactly that in February 1997.

Read “Bad Songs” at Perfect Sound Forever

Perfect Sound Forever describes itself as an online music magazine that has been around since 1993, making it an unusually early example of independent Web publishing devoted to music. The “Bad Songs” page, credited to editor Jason Gross, is a good specimen of what that publishing culture looked like when participation still meant sending in words rather than tapping an angry face.

The concept is simple: collect opinions about songs people cannot stand and let the contributors make their cases. What survives is not merely a list of titles. It is argument—subjective, occasionally ridiculous, sometimes persuasive, and very human.

That distinction matters because old Web writing often preserved individual voices more clearly than modern engagement systems do. Today a disliked song may accumulate thousands of scores, comments, reaction clips, and algorithmically sorted hot takes. A 1997 webzine page had limited space and no engagement dashboard. Somebody had to care enough to compose a complaint and somebody else had to publish it.

Perfect Sound Forever itself is the larger artifact. Independent Web magazines were one of the first demonstrations that publishing no longer required owning a press, buying broadcast time, or persuading a traditional magazine to give you column inches. A site could develop its own editorial personality, contributors, recurring subjects, and readership with comparatively little infrastructure.

The design also leaves the writing in charge. There is no infinite scroll fighting the article, no autoplaying recommendation rail, and no demand that every opinion become a video. The page is text because the text is what somebody came to read.

For researchers studying early online music criticism, fan culture, or Web publishing, that kind of survival is useful. It captures not only what people thought about particular songs but how an independent online magazine structured participation in the mid-1990s.

And, naturally, it preserves one of humanity’s oldest cultural traditions: telling other people that the music they like is garbage.

Browse the original “Bad Songs” page

The technology aged. Musical disagreement appears to be doing fine.

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Ancient Web: Masters of Melody Preserved the BBC Orchestras Radio Forgot

British radio once employed an astonishing number of studio orchestras, dance bands, light-music ensembles and military bands. Most people under a certain age barely know that ecosystem existed. Brian Reynolds built Masters of Melody to stop it disappearing completely.

Visit Masters of Melody

Reynolds describes the site as an antidote to a music culture that pushed light orchestral music out of regular broadcasting. He is not approaching the subject casually. The site says he owns a substantial collection of vintage broadcasts, composed light music himself and researched the subject in the BBC Written Archives.

The result is a dense index of names that search engines are unlikely to surface by accident: Sidney Bowman, Claude Cavalotti, Harry Fryer, Ronnie Munro, Primo Scala, Peter Yorke and dozens more. There are pages on BBC regional orchestras, military bands, old programmes such as Music While You Work, and individual broadcasts with dates and running orders.

Some pages include audio clips or full programmes. A typical entry does more than name the orchestra. It may identify the conductor, broadcast date, signature tune and complete sequence of pieces. That turns a nostalgia page into a research aid.

The site also preserves a vanished production model. Before recorded music completely dominated radio scheduling, agreements limiting recorded music helped keep live musicians working in studios. Reynolds’s pages document the enormous machinery that existed around that arrangement: staff orchestras, regional ensembles, arrangers, conductors and programmes that could fill hours of ordinary broadcasting.

Masters of Melody dates its copyright from 2008, so it is younger than many Ancient Web subjects. It belongs here because it carries forward the older personal-Web model almost perfectly: one knowledgeable person, one narrow subject, years of accumulated research, no obvious concern about whether the topic is commercially fashionable.

That is exactly the kind of site that becomes more valuable as the people who remember the subject become fewer.

The larger 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains many similar specialist archives. They often look modest because the effort went into the material rather than the interface.

Masters of Melody is still being updated, which means the archive has not merely survived. It continues to grow around music that commercial media mostly stopped carrying decades ago.

Explore Masters of Melody

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Ancient Web: Silkqin Built a Personal Library Around One Ancient Instrument

Some personal websites grow until they stop looking like homepages and start looking like somebody quietly built a research library in public.

Visit Silkqin

Silkqin is John Thompson’s long-running site devoted to the guqin, the ancient Chinese seven-string zither. The domain dates to the early 2000s, but the material represents decades of performance, translation, historical research, reconstruction, and collecting.

The site is enormous in the old-Web sense of the word.

There are sections on historical handbooks, instruments as physical objects, paintings, poetry, songs, tunings, performance practice, ideology, biographies, recordings, and the process of reconstructing music from old tablature. Navigation is dense because the subject is dense.

One particularly important theme is right in the site’s name: silk strings.

Modern guqin players often use metal-nylon strings, but Thompson has spent years documenting and advocating historically informed performance with traditional silk strings. His pages discuss how the material changes the sound and playing technique, along with the historical shift away from silk during the twentieth century.

The Web as a working notebook

Silkqin is not arranged like a museum exhibit designed to give a visitor five facts and send them onward.

It behaves like a scholar-performer’s working archive.

A page may contain historical quotations, Chinese text, translation notes, tuning details, links to related essays, audio, references to old qin handbooks, and corrections accumulated over time. Other pages provide recordings and reconstructed performances of pieces whose notation survives from centuries ago.

That makes the site particularly suited to the Web as it originally worked: many small documents joined by links, allowed to grow independently, with the reader free to disappear down whichever path becomes interesting.

It is also a reminder that the early independent Web was global in a way that gets lost when Internet history is reduced to American browser companies and dot-com startups.

A personal domain could become a publishing platform for extremely specialized cultural knowledge that would otherwise be scattered across books, manuscripts, recordings, personal correspondence, and classrooms.

Silkqin is still being used and cited by musicians and researchers. That longevity is part of its value. The site is not merely preserved; it remains useful.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes sites like this because the most valuable old pages are often the ones built by somebody who cared far more about the subject than about whether the site looked modern.

Twenty-three years of domain age is impressive.

A musical tradition measured in millennia is less easily impressed.

Explore John Thompson’s Silkqin archive

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Ancient Web: XVR27 Built a Weird Al Database Before Fandom Had One Place to Live

XVR27’s Weird Al Yankovic Homepage comes from the era when being a serious fan often meant accidentally building a database.

Visit XVR27’s Weird Al Yankovic Homepage

The site is not merely a shrine with a picture and some favorite songs. Its surviving pages organize lyrics, obscure recordings, transcripts, subject indexes, release information, and references in the obsessive way that fan sites did when search engines were worse and official sites rarely attempted completeness.

One section sorts songs by subject. Another can identify unusually short songs. Individual lyric pages preserve notes about where a song appeared, whether it was original or a parody, and other small facts useful to somebody trying to identify a half-remembered recording.

The site is explicit about one important point: its maintainer is not Weird Al Yankovic.

That disclaimer is almost a genre marker for old fan pages.

The interesting part is how long the material remained useful. XVR27 pages have been cited by later reference sites and even show up in bibliographies for lists of Yankovic recordings. Other Web directories still point visitors toward XVR27 alongside official and fan-maintained Weird Al resources.

That longevity is not accidental.

Fandom used to make its own infrastructure

Before a large wiki platform could host every entertainment property under one login system, a fan who wanted a comprehensive reference had to make one.

That meant choosing categories, building navigation, typing the pages, maintaining links, correcting information, responding to email, and deciding what counted as worth preserving.

The result could be idiosyncratic, but it also carried a human editorial shape.

XVR27’s subject pages are a good example. A commercial music database might organize recordings by album, year, songwriter, or chart position. A fan might decide that what the world needs is a list of Weird Al songs shorter than ninety seconds.

The fan is correct.

Those strange categories become useful because they correspond to the kinds of questions actual listeners ask. What was that song? Was this ever released? Was there a version performed live? Which tracks mention a certain topic?

The old Web accumulated thousands of specialized indexes like this, most maintained by one or two people with no business model and no promise that anyone would preserve the work later.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes fan archives because they frequently contain information that larger databases absorbed only years later, if they absorbed it at all.

A fan page can look silly right up until it becomes the citation.

Dig through XVR27’s surviving Weird Al archive

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Ancient Web: MIDI Shack Is a Fossil From the MIDI Web

Before streaming audio became effortless, a website could play music with a file small enough to fit comfortably on a floppy disk. Aaron Walz’s MIDI Home is still online from that version of the Web, and it has the web-ring scars to prove it.

Visit Aaron Walz’s MIDI Home

The site dates itself to March 10, 1998, with the midishack.net address arriving in 2003. Walz built it around his own MIDI compositions, video-game music and a desire to teach other people how the format worked. There are pages for original tracks, Final Fantasy music, other game MIDI files, theme songs, beginner tutorials, recordings and an archived guestbook.

The page also contains something increasingly rare: an actual mission statement from a person who made a website because he wanted to share things.

The Web when music files were tiny

MIDI does not store recorded sound the way an MP3 does. It stores musical instructions: notes, timing, instruments and other performance data that a synthesizer turns into sound. That made MIDI ideal for slow connections and early personal websites. A song could be surprisingly small because the file did not need to contain the audio waveform.

The tradeoff was that the same file could sound very different depending on the hardware or software synthesizer playing it. That was part limitation, part personality.

Walz’s site captures that period unusually well. The navigation still includes an Original MIDI Ring, links to other authors, old award graphics and references to composing pages with Notepad and Microsoft FrontPage. The news archive eventually reaches 2009, but the structure remains unmistakably late-1990s personal Web.

A personal archive that stayed personal

The strongest thing about MIDI Shack is that it never became a generic music portal. It remains somebody’s collection: his compositions, the game music that inspired him, tutorials he wrote because he wanted to teach, and links he thought other people would find useful.

That is precisely the kind of small, specific publishing the Ancient Web project keeps finding. CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list contains the larger corpus for anyone who wants to dig through more of it.

MIDI Shack is still there, background music, web rings and all. Open it with sound enabled if you are feeling brave.

Explore the surviving MIDI archive