Field notes from a dead format
Six months of buying minidiscs from people who were extremely relieved to see them go, and what turned up on them.
The minidisc occupies an unusual position: too recent to be nostalgic, too obsolete to be useful, and just cheap enough that nobody bothered to check what was on them before selling.
What people leave behind
Roughly a third of what arrives is blank. Another third is somebody’s copy of an album you can hear anywhere. The remaining third is the interesting part — band practices, radio recordings, a wedding speech, forty minutes of someone’s car journey recorded apparently by accident.
None of it was meant for us. All of it is now, functionally, an archive.
The ethics bit, briefly
We do not put any of it on the radio without knowing where it came from. This is a lower bar than it sounds and a surprising number of people clear it enthusiastically, having assumed the tapes were long gone.