Announcing the Wizrocklopedia Music Archive

fromtheeditors

One ongoing topic within the wizard rock community the past few years has revolved around older music, and its lack of availability. With MySpace fading away, and changes they made a few years back to wipe out a lot of features and available music, it’s been tougher to (legally) find older music from bands that are no longer around.

Even some popular bands have opted to not keep their music updated on subscription services like iTunes and Spotify due to ongoing maintenance fees, leaving fans searching for ways to listen to some fantastic (but older) wizard rock.

After some discussions with ‘pedia staff members, along with some current and former wizard rock bands, we decided to open up a new searchable wizard rock archive that features bands and music that have not been available online for some time.

So without further ado, we present to you the Wizrocklopedia Music Archive, hosted at Bandcamp!

Wizard rock fans can use the archive to download albums, EPs, and singles from some older bands who have given us permission to host their music for download, including Gred & Forge, Catchlove, Roonil Wazlib, and more. The bulk of the albums are available absolutely free of charge, which was the request from many of the bands. Some of the music is available as Name Your Price, so you can either download for free or opt to give the band a few dollars for their music if you like.

Because the bulk of the downloads are available for free, we are limited to a total of 200 downloads per month. If you happen to attempt a download and aren’t successful, we guess that means it’s due to the archive being too successful! If we ever get to that point, we’ll figure out what we need to do to help everyone get the downloads they want.

There are also some compilations available in the archive, many of which were originally released to help raise money for specific charities. We’ve put links to each charity on the comp’s page in the archive, and we highly encourage wizard rock fans who download those compilations to consider a donation to continue to support those great causes.

We absolutely plan to add more music to this archive over time as we speak with more bands.  Our ongoing concern is to make sure that the albums/EPs we upload are ones that the bands themselves have specifically given us permission to host. Some bands formerly sold their music online as well as in physical CD form, and have preferred to leave their music offline. We are perfectly okay with that, and will only upload music with direct permission from the bands who created it.

Bands who still have their music available online through outlets like Bandcamp and iTunes won’t be available in the archive, as we want wizard rock fans to continue to support those bands by purchasing their music directly from the artists.

We’d also like to give a big “thank you” to Your Wizard Rock Resource website; there were a few albums that we did not have release dates for when uploading them to the archive, and Susannah’s website was a valuable resource for us when it came to that info!

If your band no longer has music available online and would like us to host it for you, please let us know! Comment below or send us an email. We’ll let you know the easiest way to get us your music & artwork, and we’ll take it from there. Hosting the music at Bandcamp allows fans to find it more easily than placing it at a file sharing site with direct links, and also gives bands the option to accept money if fans would like to purchase the music instead of just downloading it for free.

If you’re a wizard rock fan and there’s some music you’d like to be able to download once again, let us know in the comments below! We’ll do our best to contact the bands to see what we can do. At this point in time, contact info for a good number of bands is woefully out of date, and we’re doing our best to try and track people down so we can be sure that we have their permission before we do anything with their music.

So head on over to the archive and download away!

9 responses to “Announcing the Wizrocklopedia Music Archive”

  1. Taz_UK Avatar
    Taz_UK

    This is wonderful. Thank you to everyone who has made this possible. <3

  2. Irvin K Avatar
    Irvin K

    Whelp, there goes my productivity for the next… um… ever.

    Huge thanks to all of you for making this a thing, because the young wrock whipper snappers of today need to be able to listen to the oldies. And it’ll be useful for me – I managed to get Catchlove and Gred & Forge’s music from friends over the years, but the rest is new to me!

  3. Susannah Avatar

    THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER LIKE SERIOUSLY

    For YEARS I have dreamed of a project like this, but never pinned down how to go about it making it or where to host it (plus I’m too shy to approach anyone, lol). I don’t own any complete versions of these albums, so this makes me very very happy.

    Hoping for lots more bands to share their music so they won’t be lost to dead links!

    (P.S. Thanks for the shoutout! I do hope I got those dates right. Some bands were very hard to track down, even with the help of the Internet Archive.)

  4. Russ Avatar

    Thanks for the kind words everyone. We’re glad we were finally able to get this project off the ground.

    There are a few other bands who had already given us permission to post, we’ve just been waiting on them to send over high quality copies of their songs. We received 3 albums overnight, and inquiries from a few other bands as well. So we’re REALLY excited so far.

    We also want to add some “MySpace only” bands to the archive as well – bands that had a good amount of output, but only ever put them on MySpace and never released an “official” album. They’re proving harder to track down than some others, but we want to make sure their contributions to wizard rock are recognized. You never know who might hear an “old” band and think it’s some of the best music they’ve ever heard!!

  5. Jewel Avatar

    This is such a terrific project and so much appreciated! Thank you!

  6. BandonJosh Avatar
    BandonJosh

    This is really cool! Takes me back… I think the Myspace-only release is a great idea! Lots of bands that only released a few songs. Cheers!

  7. Marauder Avatar
    Marauder

    Honestly, contact everyone on the Wizrocklopedia list of bands and ask them if they’d contribute. Thank you so much for this. 😀

  8. James Mahoney IV Avatar
    James Mahoney IV

    This is great news. Thank you for setting this up. This is a dream, and will surely help people find something to suit their desires. Thank you to all involved.

  9. Russ Avatar

    Marauder, as much as we would LOVE to do that, unfortunately many of the bands on that list used MySpace as their primary site, which no longer gives anyone the ability to contact them. I’d say roughly 85% of those bands don’t have any current sites or contact info available, so that means we need to rely on bands discovering the archive and letting us know they’re OK with us including their music.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *