More on the Crocodile Cafe's Music Archive

These are photographs of the new listening stations for the Crocodile Cafe sound archives located at the University of Washington's Media Center. As you can see, the computers hosting the archives (as well as their monitors) are located beyond the glass in a secure area. There has been a lot of talk in music forums about why these files aren't made available online. The basic reason is the University of Washington may own the recordings, thanks to the donation by Jim Anderson, but they do not own the rights to the intellectual content captured on the recordings, which is still owned by the bands. Most of the bands are totally stoked to know they have a few live shows archived in the University's collection for future generations of people to listen to, but they don't want unauthorized reproductions of those live shows. As the Media Center's librarian John Vallier says, "We want to be sure that we are working on the side of the artists here by both preserving their legacy and protecting their intellectual content."

So yeah, if you want to listen to them, you actually have to visit a library. For Seattlelites this is no big deal, I read a recent statistic that 80% of all people in the Seattle metro area (which is somewhere around 3.3 Million people) own library cards. If you're out of state, this just gives you another reason to come visit our wonderful city!