The Library of Congress brings you...the National Jukebox

http://www.loc.gov/jukebox/

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/05/national-jukebox-library-congress-sony-music.html

The Library of Congress is flipping a switch Tuesday that will open a large chunk of the national archive of more than 3 million music and spoken-word recordings archive public streaming as part of a new National Jukebox project, a joint venture between the library and Sony Music that will give free access to thousands of Sony-controlled recordings long out of circulation because of commercial or copyright issues.

Some of the 10,000 titles streamable at the new National Jukebox website have been unavailable for more than 100 years, a significant chunk of them because of complex laws controlling ownership of sound recordings, which did not become subject to federal copyright laws until 1972.

Among the highlights are vintage performances by celebrated classical musicians, including Enrico Caruso and Fritz Kreisler; the first blues recording, “Livery Stable Blues,” made in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band; a comedy skit by the Vaudeville team of Gallagher and Shean; speeches of President Teddy Roosevelt; piano performaces by jazz-ragtime pioneer Eubie Blake; and music of the John Philip Sousa Band conducted by its namesake.

Go nuts, folks.

AAAAIIEEEE FUCK YES

Via the LOC Twitter:

You'll be able to build your own playlists & share on Facebook...vaudeville routines, opera, jazz from its start...If that's not enough, the 1919 Victrola Book of the Opera: opera stories & illustrations with links to recordings

Now, where's the iPhone app?

This looks amazing! Site seems pretty overloaded now though - might have to wait until it's less busy to actually listen to anything...

Unsurprising but yeah, it'll settle down soon.

i can't hear music? and yeah its really show. but okay i click on a record label and am i supposed to hear the song?

Can't really listen given work right now but I'm getting a 'This content requires a web browser with Javascript enabled and Adobe Flash Player 10+' note.

this looks very neat.

Peering into the HTML source code, I see an embedded Flash player is supposed to be showing up on these pages, but that is not happening for me.

Anyone having better luck playing music yet?

I can't get it to work in chrome, safari or firefox.

try cranking up the ol' netscape navigator?

I think I have opera and camino on here too. I'll report back.

all failed. Even re-installed flash.

I think they're just overloaded. Safari activity page has "can't connect to host" errors.

I'm getting a JavaScript error in the function that is supposed to load the player.

Not working with IE either.

damned big government...

gonna go ahead and blame obama for this. come on, dude, i need my john phillips sousa! son of a bitch!

Time to defund LOC

90% of what they do is abortions anyways.

Search engine's not working for me, and I'm plugging in artists mentioned in the LA Times article.

Ah, never mind. Works with just the last name.

LOL EZ Snappin

It's working for me now -- I think the server is just overloaded.

Getting nothing here, still

working for me

yeah, works for me too now. god, haven't these people heard of noise reduction? sheesh...

finally people get to hear all the frank crumit 78s that i have seen everywhere for decades and that nobody wants.

just kidding. think its grand. i want all of universal music group's archives up by friday. okay, LOC?

hee hee
WARNING: Historical recordings may contain offensive language.
totally. the history of the recording industry is about 70% racist.

‎"Note that use of the term "humorous" indicates only the intention of the work at the time the recording was made."

Duly noted. Also, Arthur Pryor's pretty kickin'.

wow this is slammed huh?

This looks pretty incredible. Also, works fine for me today in chrome.

Happy to see that there are entire sections devoted to yodeling! and whistling!

this is amazing. are they still putting stuff up? i notice it only goes up to 1920s at the moment

This is the first wave via the Sony agreement, the idea will be to keep building it up -- there's a 'coming soon' section on the front page, and hopefully as further agreements are made we'll get more recent stuff, but the question of copyright is always going to be an unfortunate sticking point.

frank crumit coming for his ducats

sony is reserving the right to yank anything they choose to commercially reissue

National Jukebox website logs 1 million page views, 250,000 streams in under 48 hours:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2011/05/national-jukebox-library-congress-sony-music-1.html