What happens to defunct station archives?

[jake1966]

I know that this may not be the place to ask this, however, what about trading this stuff? I'd LOVE to find old BCN stuff from the 60s and 70s. Well, just about any stuff from Boston radio around that time. I have some stuff from the 80s.

 

[Oldbones]

OMG, I've been through so many station sale and seen tons of archives get thrown out. If it costs the new owners ten cents to preserve station history it gets thrown out. Someone else here said years of hard work and careful archiving can be thrown out in two seconds by the new guys. Anything that lasts seems to be held by regular people like yourselves who care. On the other hand I just threw out thousands of my old promos from WZOU, WRKO, WHDH, WEEI and places earlier in my career. I thought about transferring them all to files and saving them but when you die someday, your stuff just gets thrown out, right? So I kept a few from each place and tossed the rest. You can only save so much.

Exactly. And what do you save and what do you toss, and who decides? And will anyone ever care about 99% of this stuff or just think it's junk? Yeah, it's cool to run across an old impromptu Grateful Dead show from the days that they were just another hippie band or a bunch of old Bruce Bradley airchecks that got stashed away but storage space is finite and who knows what will be considered interesting years from now?

I remember one station I worked at in the early 90s...they'd been in the same building for probably 40 years. Untold amounts of crappe in the attic...old transmitter logs from 1965, all kinds of old no-longer-serviceable equipment, boxes of cue-burnt MOR records from long ago (mostly stiffs...looks like anything good got picked over long before I got there), etc. I was hoping to find some old jingles or airchecks, but the only programming stuff that seems to have been kept was old Sunday morning public service programs, interviews with mayoral candidates from the hotly contested 1972 election, etc and a bunch of old high school football games.

Keep in mind that most stations outside of really small markets have moved multiple times over the years, and archives are just more "stuff" that needs to be packed, moved & have a home for found at the new facility.

 

[NHRonin]

A group of dedicated people have created the Music Museum of New England
http://www.mmone.org

A natural extension of this would be to have a separate non-profit (or one under the MMOne umbrella or affiliated with MMone if all involved are in agreement) to archive air checks, playlists etc. I just found a few WRKO
playlists from the 1970s. There should be enough fans out there to compile a data base and get this stuff transferred. I have the Donna Summer WRKO broadcast from the Music Hall/WANG CENTER on cassette somewhere...these are fun things from days gone by - and, yes, WRKO should have preserved all those special moments. WRKO was instrumental in breaking both The Doobie Brothers "Listen To The Music" and Rick
Derringer's "Rock & Roll Hoochie Koo"

http://ntl.matrix.com.br/pfilho/html/lyrics/r/rock_and_roll_hoochie_koo.txt

http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:hifwxqr5ldae

Walking down Highland Ave in Malden listening to my AM radio shaped like a Coke can and hearing "Walk This Way" is one of my seminal childhood memories.