"You'll lose everything by the end...."
Hi everyone. The feelings of hopelessness connected to recent events are subsiding, not gone but going, and it's become time to decide what to do next. I lost over 700 videos when YouTube closed the Archive's channel, and with it went all the momentum that I'd felt was building (I was so close to getting half a million views of their Pinkpop 2014 show). In an attempt to try and salvage something out of all this I repeatedly contacted the main players involved in this grim tale, Skynet and the BBC, and they have both chosen to ignore any and all correspondence. Faced with their total indifference, I've had to accept that the videos and the youtube channel are now gone forever. We had a good run.
Being forcibly evicted from the YouTube party means that the potential audience for the stuff I'm sharing is reduced, and that bothers me. I want this stuff to be seen and heard by the entire world, but the most conventional way of doing that has been a failure. There was always the option of just opening another YouTube account, but I'm certain that this catastrophe will keep happening as long as I'm posting the kinds of things I do. Corporations are never going to overlook a shady bootlegger type who is freely sharing what they view as "their property" (yuck). So I think it's time to lower my profile, and retreat back to a time when the Archive was something fans found out about through word of mouth or by accident.
This is the situation at the time of writing. All the live shows in audio form are still intact at the Archive, as I have all of them on mediafire. The only things that are dead are the links to the videos. Being a super obsessive/paranoid type when it comes to the technology, I have several physical backups of everything I've ever posted so they aren't gone as such, just waiting to be re-uploaded. That takes time, but luckily the In Dream campaign is gliding gently towards the buffers and so I'll be able to focus more on rebuilding rather than playing catch up.
In terms of the video, I reached another moment where i was forced to decide how serious I am about all of this. As I've stated elsewhere I believe that streaming video is preferable to downloads because it can be watched instantly and anywhere. Vimeo is the second biggest video streaming service after YouTube, but the limitations on a free account there are impractical for the amount of material I have to share. It would be far too restrictive and take forever to get things back online again. So, as with mediafire, I opened a paid account to host all the footage I have. It's not ideal, particularly since YouTube was always free, but hopefully there's a better chance of staying off Big Bad Wolf's radar this time around. The old mantra that I repeat here at regular intervals, namely that I don't do any of this to make money is even more true now, as it's actually costing me more every month just to run this show.
There's a few clips on the new profile, with the most obvious one being the gig at Sziget, and I'll be continuing to update and recreate everything that I had on YouTube. It's going to take time, but it's time well spent. Thanks for your patience, here's something for your bookmarks:-
(Link nuked by Vimeo, Archive is now back on YouTube. Irony.)
brought to you with lots and lots of lemming-love :) x
