Swedish pirate collector releases a historical pop archive
 

At the end of June this year a Swedish music collector known by name swetrot released on Pirate Bay a collection of historical proportions. It took almost 10 years and a lot of hard work from him to get it all together but there it was: a complete archive of each and every song that had ever made it to the Swedish Pop Charts during the 22 years that the charts had existed. Some other pirates had earlier released Top 50 or Top 100 style collections of more limited scope but this was the complete thing. Most of the material swetrot found from Internet, starting his downloading with a painfully slow 33.6 kbps modem around the time when mp3 files first became available on the Net. Some of the rarer songs he managed to hunt down from friends and strangers, scanning through heaps of old vinyls at various attics and cellars.

The collection has enjoyed great popularity at Pirate Bay since its release but today it found its way also into mainstream media when Lars Lindström, the news chronicler of newspaper Expressen, introduced swetrot's work to his readers. He praised the efforts of swetrot and seriously suggested a cultural prize for him for the achievement. And indeed the collection is a major body of pop culture history - 17.34 GB in size, with 3990 songs, i.e. over 270 hours of music in it. Lindström noted that an archive like this should be available in libraries. While that may take time to happen, at least it is available for the international audience of BitTorrent users on Pirate Bay. Lindström concludes his story by emphasizing how the 'heavy league' filesharers - perhaps 10 % of all p2p users - are really serious collectors of music for whom getting their content from retailers is not even an option.