Introduction

This chapter explores the expanding range of community archiving activity concerned with the preservation of cultures, experiences and memories associated with popular music. Engendered by forms as disparate as jazz, rock, soul or country music, such is the variety of this field that a similarly expanding scholarly literature has emerged as a means of mapping and understanding its meanings and significance. While much of this activity takes a familiar physical form (Baker, 2017), here we explore the ways in which the digital enables the extension of such activity. In further democratising the nature of historical work and the archive, online practice is also suggestive of how popular pleasures are subject to a form of cultural justice, a concept which frames this chapter.

The nature of online community archives of popular music can be illustrated with reference to heavy metal, the most listened to genre of music on the streaming service Spotify (Van Buskirk, 2015). Affirming this popularity, Wall Street Journal reporter Neil Shah (2016) describes the genre as the real ‘World Music’, that ‘Heavy Metal has become the unlikely soundtrack of globalization’. While record sales and tour receipts attest to the genre's economic power, its popularity is equally tangible in the activity of hundreds of thousands of individuals who contribute to the range of communities of interest associated with it. These are most visibly formed online at sites such as Metal Wiki (https://metal.wikia.com) or Metal Travel Guide (https://www.metaltravelguide.com), an ‘evolving database of rock and metal clubs, bars, pubs, venues and more all added and reviewed by people like you!’

A key site discussed in this chapter is Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archives (https://www.metal-archives.com), which, alongside the dynamic world of current activity, seeks to record the genre's global history. This archival intent is not uncommon among similar online communities. In relation to the metal genre, for instance, on Facebook one can find Museo del Metal En Paraguay (The Paraguayan Metal Museum), MetalMusicArchives or Old School Metal, T Shirts And Memorabilia, while on Twitter, the user Black Antiquarium presents ‘Black Metal pics from ‘80s, ‘90s & present days’. One of the most ambitious projects to engage the metal community in building its collective history is the Home of Metal project.