YouTube Music uploads saved my rare songs — here’s how

[phillynews215]

Music collecting and appreciation is a deeply personal hobby. It’s something very important to me and serves as a snapshot of time and place. Over the years, most of us of a certain vintage have built our music libraries piece by piece, from rare digital downloads and fan remixes to songs that never made it to streaming platforms. Even mixtapes if you, like me, are a 90s or earlier kid. For me, those tracks represent more than nostalgia. They’re a record of growing up online, scouring file-sharing forums for one-off singles, MySpace, and now, an ever-growing collection of vinyl records collected during my travels.

Every record I collect tells a story. A dusty Cuban jazz album I picked up in Havana, the Japanese city pop release I stumbled upon in a secondhand store in Shibuya, or the deep techno record from a small label in Berlin that went under decades ago. You catch my drift. These albums aren’t just music albums, they’re memories. And yet, when I want to go back to any of them on the go, it’s not an option. Way too many of them don’t exist anywhere in the digital domain. Not on Spotify, not on Apple Music, and all too often, not even on YouTube.




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