"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
news:znr1065047074k@trad...

I know the answer it this is "You never know" but honestly, I think
there's so much stuff that people are concerned with preserving
forever that nobody will ever care about. When a bunch of negatives
got soaked in a basement flood earlier this year, I didn't cry. Sure,
I was saving them but that's just because I don't throw away things
until they get in the way. But I really didn't expect that 50 years
after I die someone would really care about printing from those
negatives. And I feel the same way about any music I've recorded.

Generally something worth archiving is recognized (in its lifetime) by
experts who will see to it that it's preserved in the best way
possible at the time, and continued to be "refreshed." But no music
historian has ever knocked on my door asking if he can have copies of
my recordings. That's the real test for whether I need to worry about
archiving them.

Now I'm going to argue against myself.g

Like I said, I'm a photographer and I was doing some amateur stuff in
college back in the 70s, taking pictures of my parents and other family
stuff. I didn't take care of it then, and now I wish I had, with both
parents gone and my mother's house (and subsequently a lot of that old
stuff) damaged by various neglect. Some of that stuff was also family photos
my dad had shot during the 50s and (in bad, very fugitive color) the 60s. I
was too young to care about that then.

I work for a state agency that contains the state museum and archive, and I
see how they scramble to find photo, audio and film documentation of various
eras in our state history. (we just recently found a painting of one
governor's wife, the only one we had NO documentation of) A lot of that
documentation comes from amateurs. So we don't know while we're alive what's
going to be valuable to our families or our histories.

What's amusing is that people will collect crap on Ebay beause someone says
it's collectible, but not take care of their own stuff. The easiest answer
is to start with a system and keep up with it. If you create more stuff than
you can store or catalogue, you're doing too much.

BTW, maybe no music historian has heard your stuff.