Join Sound Files in an exploration of The Great 78 Project, a major initiative by the Internet Archive to preserve hundreds of thousands of fragile shellac discs (aka "78s"). We meet folks like preservationists George Blood and Brewster Kahle who are working to preserve old records by making them digital. The project brings jazz, blues, and forgotten voices back to life. You'll also meet educator Jason Luther. Along the way, hear about how they've perfected the digitization process with fancy turntables and multiple needles, and why preserving these fragile sounds matters for history, music, and culture buffs everywhere.
Ready to step back in time? This episode explores The Great 78 Project, an initiative of the Internet Archive and George Blood Audio. They are preserving old records as digital treasures—bringing jazz, blues, and forgotten voices back to life. Along the way, you'll hear how they perfect the process with fancy turntables and multiple needles, and why preserving these fragile sounds matters for history, music, and culture buffs everywhere.
But it’s not all smooth sailing. High-stakes legal challenges are shaping the future of access to this treasure trove of sound. Major publishers and preservationists don't necessarily agree on the best ways to provide access to the preserved recordings. The episode wraps up with the latest update in this battle: after a long fight, the matter was settled out of court. Still, the work to preserve and share history continues, and we continue to face big questions about access, control, and the sustainability of cultural memory.
Credits:
Jesse Johnston, creator of Sound Files and a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, hosts the podcast. Teresa Carey is the senior producer, editor, and creative lead for Morse Alpha Studios, which produced this podcast. Writing is by Ashley Hamer Pritchard, editing by Jacob Pinter, field production by Erin McGregor, and sound engineering by Steve Lack. Original music by Evan Haywood.
Host: Just a quick note before we get started—when we recorded this episode, our guests were still in the middle of a lawsuit, which you’ll hear us talk about quite a bit. Since then, that case has been resolved. Stick around to the end and I’ll fill you in on how it all turned out.
Host: If you've got old records or videotapes gathering dust in your attic, you probably know how difficult it can be to replay them.
This is George Blood Audio, Video, Film & Data in Pennsylvania, just north of Philadelphia. While it might look like a sterile, fluorescent-lit office building, it’s got all the mystery of an Indiana Jones movie. George and his team take obscure and outdated media formats like cassette tapes from your parents’ generation and records from your great-grandparents’—and create digital files from them. No matter how obscure the format, somewhere in George's tidy warehouse you’ll find the clunky, discontinued equipment—the stuff archivists and engineers sometimes call “obsolete media”—that can bring those recordings back to life.
George Blood: Most of what we do is the preservation, digitization of sound and moving image collections. We also migrate data, and we also have a little bit of a business doing live sound recording and some post production.
Host: You might be familiar with old formats like VHS and cassette tape—Blood's facility certainly works with those. But they also digitize everything from wax cylinders to floppy disks to a type of film reel straight from the 1950s called two-inch quadruplex. 163 formats in all—digitized so future generations can access them.
And business is booming. Their clients have included the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, the National Park Service, and the Library of Congress, just to name a few.
George Blood: Alright, so as things are processed upon arrival, they come in here.
Host: George Blood strolls through the warehouse. Some rooms feel like a laundromat—if laundromats were filled with giant machines with spinning tape reels instead of clothes. Others feel like an antique shop, filled with turntables on ornate wooden cabinets. Everywhere, history is coming to life—one reel, one record at a time.
George Blood: This is our climate-controlled storage. It's 25,000 cubic feet. We can't say how many tapes this holds because sometimes, like those, they're very big and sometimes they're very small. Um, we've digitized over 1.7 million items.
Host: Digital preservation is a business for Blood, but it’s also a bit of a passion. History is filled with what-ifs. What if the Library of Alexandria didn’t burn, and we could read what was inside? What if ancient languages weren’t lost, save for a few indecipherable scraps? George doesn’t want future generations to ask, What if we could still hear all of those old reel-to-reel tapes?
George Blood: You know, there's a lot of information that gets lost all the time. The inherent vice of different means of storing information. Whether it's acetate-based motion picture film that shrivels up and gets brittle or, you know, papyrus that, you know, rots, or even worse, in the middle of the 20th century, acidic paper. Paper goes brown and just like crumbles in your fingers.
Host: In his pursuit of preserving historical audio and video, Blood has a lot in common with one of his most recent clients, the Internet Archive. It's a nonprofit digital library [00:03:00] that provides free access to old websites, books, audio recordings, and other media that might otherwise be stored away in a museum, sitting in an archive, or lost to time entirely. And running the Internet Archive is more than a job for Brewster Kahle.
Brewster Kahle: The idea is to try to make it so that all the published works of humankind would be available to anybody that's curious enough to want access to it.
Host: For Brewster, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, preserving history is a passion.
Brewster Kahle: So that was the dream of the Internet that I signed on to. And the Internet Archive is just sort of the latest phase of that to try to then build permanent materials that can be studied in a classic research library context.
Host: Here's where those dusty records in your attic come in. The Internet Archive and George Blood want to preserve and open up access to material recorded on old 78s, a once dominant but now defunct audio recording format—but record companies are pushing back in a legal battle that could restrict free access to all of those digitally preserved sounds.
I’m Jesse Johnston, and you’re listening to Sound Files… a podcast about the preservation of recorded sounds, supported by the National Recording Preservation Foundation.
In this episode… cue up the turntable and dust off the shellac.
We’re diving into The Great 78 Project.
We’ll explore the work to save thousands of old 78 rpm records—capturing the crackles, pops, and music of a bygone era–through digital preservation… so anyone can drop the needle on history. Even you!
We’ll also hear about some of the challenges of sharing these recordings. Some, including the Internet Archive, see this as cultural rescue. Others? Copyright infringement. And in 2025, it headed to court—a case that may shape how we can access the past.
Host: Many of us are probably familiar with the LP, or long playing record, that 10- or 12-inch vinyl format. It was introduced in the late 1940s, and even today the format is pretty popular—if a little hipster.
But recorded sound has gone through many transformations. One of the earliest formats was Thomas Edison's wax cylinder in 1877, followed a decade later by Emile Berliner’s flat disc recordings—and a phonograph that could play them. Those first discs were made from all sorts of things—but eventually they settled on shellac, a brittle material made from resin derived from beetles—the insects, not the band! Despite being scratch resistant, it was fragile and produced a pretty noisy signal. But shellac records reigned supreme until the 1940s.
Early shellac records were recorded at a number of different speeds, too. But eventually, the industry landed on 78 RPMs, or revolutions per minute, as their standard speed.
These records were called 78s. But if you were a person living in the early 20th century, you just called them "records." They were basically the only game in town for a full 50 years. Most of them couldn't play more than 5 minutes per side, so sometimes you'd have to flip the record over to hear an entire song. But still, anyone who was anyone from that era recorded in this format. Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, and B.B. King.
Those artists are easy to find today with just a few clicks on Spotify. But a lot of the music, radio shows, and spoken-word recordings that made their mark in the era of the 78 can only be found on those records. And they’re fragile in themselves and can only be played on specialized equipment.
The Great 78 project is an effort to digitize these 78s and make them accessible to researchers, educators, pretty much anyone who wants to hear them. More than 100 libraries and collections are donating their records to the project so they can be archived digitally as well as physically. That's good if you want to hear a scratchy recording of old Blue Eyes—it's just a few clicks away. But what's more important is the artists you haven't heard of—and the content you wouldn't think to look for.
George Blood: You really do have this window into time and you know, who the people of this era thought about themselves, you know, who, who are we.
Host: According to Brewster Kahle from the Internet Archive… the sounds recorded on these 78s could help us understand the birth of some huge American cultural movements. We might get a front-row seat to the birth of country music… or jazz, or blues. We could hear from immigrant communities in their own words… and their own language. Although Brewster cautions that 78s are not as pristine as the music we’re used to.
Brewster Kahle: Um, and you know what, when people want to hear it, you know, for real, if they wanted to just enjoy Frank Sinatra, they'd go for the, uh, remastered things. But there is some value. There's a value to hearing things as what did America sound like? And that is, I think, what the Great 78 Project brings to the world.
Host: Researchers and educators are already getting a lot out of the project. Jason Luther is an associate professor of writing arts at Rowan University in New Jersey just outside Philadelphia, and he used the Great 78 project in one of his classes. The curriculum centered on the Radio Corporation of America Museum on campus, which was full of old phonographs, so Jason needed a way for his students to access the music that was once played on those machines.
Jason Luther: There were thousands and thousands of different recordings in the Great 78 project when I came upon it. And so students could find different ways to choose a recording that they were interested in.
Host: You’ll be surprised to hear that kids these days aren't interested in old dixieland bands of the 1910s—they want the stuff they've heard of. Jason says his students would beeline for recognizable names like Sinatra or Judy Garland. But he pushed them to dig deeper into the collection.
Jason Luther: Um, you know, Frank Sinatra doesn't need any help. He doesn't need any help.
Occasionally, they would pick a really cool old recording that was either very strange or weird. Or was a person of color or a woman who just got swept into the dustbins of history. So that was really cool to see different students pick something interesting.
And so when that would happen, it was, it was really magical.
Host: That magic is like hearing an echo of something lost in time. But it also reminded the students how quickly fame can fade.
Jason Luther: I hoped that it taught them about how pop culture itself is ephemeral, how the people today are maybe not going to be remembered in a hundred years.
'Cause they would find these people who were, you know, basically pop stars, opera stars, or they were, they were well known among most Americans at the time. And now like Vernon Dollhart, for example, was a pretty famous singer that most people don't know. And so for all the pop and fame we think these artists have, it really disappears after a while, after a generation or two.
Host: As much as we don't know about many of the artists who recorded on 78s during their heyday, we also don't know exactly what those 78s were meant to sound like. So when people like George Blood digitize them, they have to make some decisions.
George Blood: The 78s aren't standardized for speed, or equalization, or stylus size.
Host: The stylus is also known as the needle. It's the part that touches the record. It rides in the record's grooves to send a signal to an amplifier. Then, that signal continues through a whole chain of technology… until it becomes a digital file you can edit on your computer.
George Blood: And you can change the speed after the fact, play the file faster or slower. You can change the equalization after the fact, add more or less high frequency boost. But the physical interaction with the size of the stylus transcribing the groove is something you can't fix after the fact.
So traditionally what you would do is you'd have a variety of stylus sizes, and [00:11:00] you'd put one in and listen to it, take it out, put a different size in, listen to it, put another one in, and you decide which one you like best.
And the professional golden ears who do this for a living would choose the one that's best.
Host: Now, if you're digitizing a handful of records, this one-by-one method is fine. But when you're working with the quantities the Internet Archive demands, that method doesn’t get you very far.
George Blood: We were working on a very large project for the Library of Congress. It was 10,000 discs. And I realized right away that it was going to be incredibly tedious. Taking those styli in and out, not to mention that it's very easy to damage the whole assembly.
Host: So George took a page out of Thomas Edison's book and invented something himself.
George Blood: So I built a turntable that had four tone arms on it and you put a different styli in each one. And then you can very quickly compare them side by side, not be dependent upon your aural memory or how much you fumbled and got upset trying to change the stylus size.
And it was a tremendous time saver and you got more consistent and repeatable results, 'cause you could hear them side by side so easily. And the original concept of the turntable with the four tone arms was just an efficiency, way to make the whole process go more quickly. But when I was talking to Brewster Kahle about the origination of this project, he proposed that, well, why don't we keep all of them? And then the end user can decide what they like.
Brewster Kahle: When I met him, he showed me this picture of a turntable with four different tone arms. Four tone arms! So he records it four times at once at 96 kilohertz, which is so much information.
And so, of course, the Internet Archive goes and has all of those.
Host: With George's method, the end user gets everything.
George Blood: What we provide for the Great 78 Project is 16 different variations that are being captured simultaneously, leaving the end user to decide, you know, I like this stylus because it has cleaner high frequencies, even if it's a little bit noisier.
But on this disc, you know, because of the music or it's quiet, or I like this one because the larger stylus isn't as noisy. I mean, we, you know, in the trade, we sell it as an objective choice, but you know, it's really an aesthetic choice too. What do you like?
Jordan Gold: Let's see if we have anything interesting here.
Host: We took a tour of George Blood's studio to see these tone arms. Record digitization tech Jordan Gold showed us how they work.
Jordan Gold: This is a German record. Archive production. Okay, so it's under the gramophone label. We've got our side 2 and side 1.
So, what we'll do is place the record down, and then I would type in the barcode, take a picture of B side, A side, (clicking sounds) Then come to Reaper. Cue it up.
So right now you hear all four styli playing at once. Call that the insanity sound. But, come through and listen to each one. So this one I think, the 2.3 sounds best. That's like on the smaller side for [00:16:00] 78s.
Host: But as George's team and the Internet Archive work to digitize hundreds of thousands of 78s, someone else is working just as hard to stop them. And it could mean the end of the Internet Archive as we know it.
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This battle began not with records, but with books. In March of 2020, right when the COVID pandemic began, the Internet Archive launched a service they called the Emergency Library. The archive was already in the business of lending digital copies of books to people one at a time, but the Emergency Library removed that one-at-a-time rule so any number of people could borrow these scanned books at any given moment. A few months later, a bunch of major publishers sued the Internet Archive for copyright infringement, and won.
Soon after, the same legal team set their sights on Brewster Kahle’s Great 78 Project.
Brewster Kahle: For 15 years, this project has been running along and, you know, we've gone to industry conferences and all the high up executives from these record labels are all like, great, this is awesome, right? There's no competition from this. Nobody's came forward and said, no, you have to take these particular list of things down because da, da, da, da da.
But then, after the Internet Archive was sued by the publishers, the same lawyers that sued us as part of the publisher suit said, oh, hey, let's just sue them some more.
Host: So, what made people at the record labels change their minds?
For one, copyright law has changed.
Back when this project started in 2006, none of the 78s being digitized were protected by copyright.
In fact, up until the 1970s, there were no federal copyright protections for recorded sounds.
Jessica Litman: When Congress extended copyright law to recordings in 1971, it made it prospective only. So recordings that were recorded from 1972 or after were protected by copyright. But recordings from before were not.
Host: That's Professor Jessica Litman. She teaches copyright law at the University of Michigan Law School. She's not involved in the Great 78 Project lawsuit, but she's been watching it closely.
Jessica Litman: So when they decided to archive them and digitize them so that they weren't lost, there wasn't any copyright problem with that. But then, in 2018, record labels persuaded Congress to enact retroactive copyright protection for any recordings first recorded before 1972.
And suddenly, all of these old recordings are protected by copyright.
Host: That 2018 law is called the Music Modernization Act. And it does grant an exception for non-commercial use of those recordings. It requires paperwork: you have to file a notice with the copyright office and they have to give the copyright owner the ability to opt out if they want to.
Professor Litman says the Internet Archive was on solid legal ground until 2018. At that point, they could have stopped the project in reaction to the law.
Jessica Litman: Or they could have said, there is this procedure we can use to make these recordings lawfully. So we're going to go ahead and file with the Copyright Office. And if any record company says, no, I opt out, then we can stop with that. They didn't do that. No, they just kept going. It was a little risky. Much of what they do is a little risky.
Host: Brewster Kahle says that as soon as record companies pointed out that the Great 78 Project included copyrighted sounds, the Internet Archive would take down that portion—but only at their request.
Brewster Kahle: And the record labels, I think, are just after money or they're after putting the Internet Archive to death. So they basically, out of the 450,000 lovingly transcribed and transferred 78 RPM records, they found 4,000 that they objected to. And instead of going and saying, taking them down, which we would have right away, they sued over it.
And given what the publishers have done to the American copyright system, that can be 600 million dollars. Really. So, this could be a death blow to the Internet Archive.
Host: According to Professor Litman, the law professor, the Internet Archive’s case depends on a couple of different arguments. First, that the recordings are more than three years old, so they’re past the statute of limitations. The court has already shot down that argument, since the Internet Archive is still digitizing 78s as we speak.
Jessica Litman: The second thing they're arguing is, look, we're a library, we're making an archive of sound that is fragile and valuable.
And so it ought to be fair use, because we're not competing with you. These are not the same recordings that you record labels are selling and licensing. And you have no interest in commercially exploiting the recordings we've archived because the sound is too primitive. We just want to host an archive so that people can hear it.
Host: The record labels don’t buy this argument. They say the recordings on the 78s ARE the same as commercially available recordings, whether or not one was digitally enhanced.
Jessica Litman: The other thing it hinges on is just the Fair Use defense, which is, a case-by-case sort of analysis about how likely it is that the Internet Archive's copies of these recordings are going to substitute for the record label's recordings. They say it's unlikely. The record labels say, what do you mean? It's free. Ours costs money. So of course people are going to listen to yours. And I think they're wrong about that as a factual matter, to the extent that anyone now has a Spotify or Apple Music or whatever subscription, everything feels free.
Host: One possible resolution to this case would involve the record labels telling the Internet Archive which recordings to take down, and the archive would do it. And for their part, the Internet Archive would file for non-commercial use of any records they digitize in the future, and only upload the ones they [00:24:00] have permission to share. But Litman says both sides of this case have drawn battle lines.
Jessica Litman: I think the record labels are very angry, so it's kind of hard for them to back down. And I think the Internet Archive has always been a little arrogant, and so it's kind of hard for them to back down.
I mean, if the court decides that it's fair use, then the Internet Archive doesn't go out of business, and the record labels don't actually lose anything meaningful except the precedent. If the record labels prevail, then this whole thing gets taken offline. I don't think they'll fight hard enough to make the Great 78 Project actually erase its archive.
It's just, it will be available, I would think, only to people who go and travel to where the recordings are and put on headphones.
Host: In September 2024, the two parties in the case participated in a private mediation session, but that didn't take them out of the courtroom for long. The case is still scheduled to go forward this year. We reached out to lawyers for both parties; one responded on background only.
Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive see this as something bigger than a collection of scratchy old records. They think it will define the role of libraries in American society.
Brewster Kahle: In the United States, a hundred years ago, the United States was a leader in libraries. Think of the Carnegie libraries, and the Carnegie libraries went up in every town and they were supported by legislatures and they were supported by the judiciary. So when the publishers went and tried to go and say, no, you're not allowed to borrow books, right, blah, blah, blah, the judiciary sided with the public but over the last hundred years, laws have gotten more and more slanted against libraries and against the public.
And they can go and sue not just the library, they can go and sue people.
Jason Luther: What would happen if that, if the Great 78 Project disappeared would be, I'd have to figure out what kind of database we would use for recorded sound.
Host: That's Jason Luther again, the teacher at Rowan University. For the record, he comes down on the side of the Internet Archive.
Jason says he just doesn’t have resources like these. Taking away the Great 78 archive means his students lose access to a piece of American history.
Jason Luther: When I was at Syracuse University, um, it was a well-funded private school. They had the Belfer Audio Archive, which is one of the largest audio archives in the United States. They had a, that was very well-funded, and they had some just amazing historical wax cylinders and other 78s. And they digitize those in-house and they share them in-house.
That was a great resource. But when I came to Rowan, I did not have that. And so what made the Great 78 so helpful is it’s public. It's there for everyone to work [00:28:00] with and remix.
You know, I think the lawsuit complains about copyright infringement as if people were just like passing around Sinatra MP3s and it's hurting his estate or something, it's so ridiculous.
It's really about corporate control of media. And it's unfortunate because it would take away opportunities to learn.
Host: This case could decide the future of access to digitized historical sound collections. Will they remain accessible online, or will the libraries and archives that can digitize collections for preservation purposes be forced to restrict access? If access is restricted, only researchers with the time and resources to travel—will be able to reach them. That would mean broader public audiences lose the chance to learn from and connect with these recordings, just as Jason’s students did.
At stake is more than just music—it’s a legal battle over access, ownership, and the very definition of cultural memory.
Host: And that brings us to the update I promised about the lawsuit involving The Great 78s Project and the major record labels. Since we recorded this episode, the two parties have reached a settlement. The details of the arrangement are not public, and we are still waiting to find out what the future holds for the Great 78s Project. We’ll keep our ears open for updates and what this may mean for the future of audio preservation. Thanks for staying with us through this story.
This podcast is presented with generous support from the University of Michigan School of Information and distributed by the National Recording Preservation Foundation, an independent nonprofit established by the Library of Congress. The NRPF works to promote and preserve audio history. Learn more about our preservation programs, or make a donation, at recordingpreservation.org.
This show is produced by Teresa Carey, with writer Ashley Hamer Pritchard, script editor Jacob Pinter, field producer Erin McGregor, sound engineer Steve Lack with original music by Evan Haywood.
I'm Jesse Johnston, creator of Sound Files and Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information.
Remember: every sound tells a story—so let’s keep preserving them.