The Wayward Archive
Since shortly after its launch in 1949, DR’s central music archive has worked with a systematized approach to the acquisition of music, which leads to an archival ordering based on the logic of taxonomy (see Michelsen et al. 2018; Pedersen 2022, 2023). Such logic still powers the music archive today. The database underlying the present digital music archive implements and broadens the taxonomic logic, turning it into a logic of interrelations. Thus, the digital music archive makes its metadata operational. The archival ordering institutes an infrastructure for how to register and store music releases that potentiates the metadata of the releases through having them go into dialogue with each other. For example, different versions of the same release – such as an original release and a remastered version – point to each other, making sure that they are not singular entities without a connection. Correspondingly, when making search retrievals, it is possible to group releases into release-year or (meta-tagged) genres. Such an organization signifies future capacities of the music archive. Besides releases, the taxonomic system includes the categories of tracks, artists, and compositions, and the logic of interrelations motor these categories too.
The database regards metadata as more than annotated information informing the user about some actual release-relevant particulars. They are put to use here as a way to open up the music archive. Metadata links to other metadata, which makes the collection operate by way of its own consciousness of curation, so to speak. As such, the music archive demonstrates a sensibility – and sensitive reactivity – towards metadata as well as a sensibility towards the irregular compound of music-historical connections that we all assemble in our singular experiences. My sources (cf. fn. 3) reveal that the Department of the Music Archive at DR shows an ongoing fascination with the possibilities of a digital music archive that is somehow communicated to the Danish public. Furthermore, these sources indicate that down-voted or canceled solutions indirectly influence workflows as well as present and future imaginations of (digital) processes. DR DJ, therefore, carries a dual importance: as a recent example of strategic deliberations that impact on the present state of the digital music archive and as signifying unfulfilled desires and visions that are worth pondering on. All archives carry abandoned potentials within them that might say something about said archives.