To make up the blog post I missed, I spend a while to think about what kind of archive or collection I’d like to present and it turns out that the archives for music fascinate me most.

Rather than just an online music site for the age of the internet technology, the Free Music Archive (FMA) is an interactive music library that involves blog post, latest single reviews, downloads of the archived music, etc. FMA provides legal audio downloads, which is directed by WFMU, a non-commercial community radio station renowned for the freeform and high-quality of its music collection. Thousands of featured mix are available via FMA legally. On this basic level, the music resources on FMA, which exist in a way of reviewing the accessibility of the pieces of music tracks in the past and present online, completely embody the concept of “extension of the period of time” (Mbembe 21).

On top of the FMA home page, visitors can easily choose what they want and browse this site via “by curator” and “by genre”. Curators from throughout the world select and upload the latest music onto their pages. Featured blogs as well unfold the upcoming music festivals, the introduction of artist collectives and the stories behind a certain piece of music which are all connected to the archive. Most of the music resources can be found via genre, through which the music resources on FMA are catalogued into 15 different styles, including blues, jazz, hip hop, country and the like. In each genre tracks, a specific item can be found by the artist, track title, and album. In this sense, the items of FMA is“in a system that facilitates identification and interpretation” (Mbembe 20).

In addition to enjoying the latest music and searching for archived resource, the FMA visitors are allowed to build up music archive of their own by registering their own accounts. As a result, individuals’ participation in the entire process of archive on FMA entails a certain degree of creation: they are able to make comments on what they are interested in; they post blogs to express their ideas, thoughts and stories in relation to music; they even make friends by sharing the great music on FMA. Unlike those traditional archive or online archive networks which are tightly concentrated on professional archiving, FMA looks more like a conflation of archive and social network.

In my understanding, “…the archive affirms the past, present, and future; it preserves the records of the past and it embodies the promise of the present to the future” (Manoff 11) indicates the fact that such archive websites like FMA combine the past and present through music, sometimes even predict or analyze the latent music trend in the future by connecting the people and sharing their different ideas, which sounds rather inspiring and stimulatory to lots of music maniacs and researchers. On this level, the fact that FMA evolves from the diversity and creation of the new has challenged Derrida’s statement: “there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destruction drive” (Derrida, 19). However, I’m still considering that whether it is appropriate for an archive to be entertaining. It’s worthy of thinking about should the nature of online archive website cater to public popularity or authority on a relatively limited researchers.