Ripping the pith from the Peel: Institutional and Internet cultures of archiving pop music radio

Abstract

Although the influential BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel (1939–2004) broadcast on average three times a week for 37 years, until the last four years of his life only a small number of complete recordings of his programmes had been made and preserved by the BBC sound archives. This article seeks to explain the institutional, technological and cultural context behind this absence, and compare it with the recent practice of Internet-enabled fan archiving of shows, based on the restoration and digitization of listeners’ shared off-air cassette recordings. An anonymous online survey indicated the taping, sharing and archival practices and principles of more than 1000 self-defined ‘regular listeners’ to Peel’s programmes. Expert interviews were conducted with past and present BBC Radio archivists, and senior BBC executives directing the corporation’s digital archival development. It is discovered that Peel listeners share archival, technical and ethical values with contemporary BBC archival developers, which could suggest mutually beneficial future, crowdsourcing approaches to expanding the accessibility of music-radio archives in general.