[sxcurry]

Interesting story, but I wonder if there really is any value in preserving all this stuff? When I read about the efforts to save disappearing websites, I wonder the same thing. Isn't there some value in letting things just disappear, like dead trees rotting in the woods? I used to joke about a paid service that would come to your house and take all your old photos and movies, and throw them out for you...

[gwern]

For your use cases, perhaps not. But I'm a writer on the Internet, and links are important to things I write; I'm already up to at least 559 links to Internet Archive copies of webpages, and that's with me trying to find live copies of each link and all my writings being fairly recent. Am I glad the IA exists? You betcha.

[Strilanc]

Data is valuable. To historians it is intrinsically valuable, but it's also instrumentally valuable for machine learning. Even the terrible stuff can inform language models for understanding the good stuff.

[NAFV_P]

> Even the terrible stuff can inform language models for understanding the good stuff.

The terrible stuff may be used for cutting and scratching. If you scratch the vinyl, it adds character.

[dzhiurgis]

If you'd like your music clean, you would be surprised of how little we have. Take for example dub reaggae. So far I managed to amass 10 albums that are studio quality. There are few hundred tracks that are CD quality. And then there are thousands of MP3 garbage.

Vinyls is the only way to get back to that. Remember, all new music is just samples of old. And there aren't that many good quality samples, so new music is limited to shit quality.

[lazyant]

As mentioned in the article, for some countries like Cuba, these records were not digitized and are the only source of the music of an era