Basically the story is this: in 1984 a German kid named Darius was taping a rock radio show. In 2007 he and his sister Lydia found the tape again, but were unable to identify one of the songs. So Lydia posted the song online.
For the next 17 years millions of people around the world searched and investigated, trying to find out what this song was. The song became known as “The most Mysterious song on the Internet,” or “Like the Wind,” as that’s the first line in the song. The recording was old and not entirely clear in places, and people argued endlessly over what the lyrics actually were.
Multiple subreddits became devoted to the search for the band, and it spawned an entire genre called Lostwave. Many people devoted years of their lives to searching archives, not only online but searching through actual radio station archives and similar places, turning up in person and spending hours, days, weeks, months and eventually years of their lives searching for the band who created this masterpiece. Youtubers like Justin Whang made multiple videos documenting the search.
Even the radio station that originally broadcast the song got involved, trying to help but had no idea what the song was. It seemed a lost cause. People even started to believe the song had somehow crossed into our dimension from a parallel universe, as apart from this recording, there was no trace of it, like it had never existed.
Two weeks ago, the mystery was finally solved. Turns out it’s called “Subways of Your Mind,” and it’s awesome:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwiEvPMANa8&list=RDDwiEvPMANa8&start_radio=1
The real tragedy is that there are thousands upon thousands of vital and important movies, music, art and books from the global south rotting away inside and outside of archives right this moment, things that are actually worth something, unlike any of those shitty children tv shows any "lost media afficionados" pretend to care about.
YES I completely understand & agree
lots of people hoarding the most best quality versions of south park, collecting every Nirvana bootleg ever created, and seeding torrents of the complete collection of Playboy scanned at highest quality. These will be preserved til the very end of humanity's computing ability if not beyond. Everything else it is a total coinflip as to what happens to it.
archive.org isn't immune from the white/male/anglo/affluent bias but they have some organizational impulse against it. I wish they would articulate more strongly the importance of diverse media preservation because their voice carries weight among the amateurs with time/resources/expertise to actually do this work on a volunteer basis.