SPILL FEATURE: VERY LITTLE ON THE INTERNET IS FOREVER – A CONVERSATION WITH CAM GORDON, CREATOR OF TRACK CHANGES: THE ORIGIN STORY OF CANADIAN MUSIC ON THE INTERNET (1990 – 2010)

VERY LITTLE ON THE INTERNET IS FOREVER

A CONVERSATION WITH CAM GORDON, CREATOR OF TRACK CHANGES: THE ORIGIN STORY OF CANADIAN MUSIC ON THE INTERNET (1990 – 2010)

There has always been an assumption that everything on the internet is there forever. In fact that is not a true statement. Websites, posts, music, art, and information disappear on the internet. And, as with physical archives, there needs to be a way to identify and keep this material for now and the future. This is where Cam Gordon comes onto the scene. He has created Track Changes. Track Changes is a new social media archive of websites, articles, photos, and videos of Canadian music and artists content from 1990 to 2010.

Gordon has a solid knowledge of music and technology. He has written for the Toronto Star, Wavelength Music, plus such defunct music publications as Chart/Chart ATTACK, The Nerve and Soul Shine. He also wrote for Spill Magazine for quite a while. He was also the longtime head of communications for Twitter for Canada.

“It all starts way back when I started using the internet in the mid-1990s, which coincided with me becoming a massive, borderline obsessive, music fan,” Gordon said during our recent conversation. “When I think back to when my family first got the internet, probably 1995, it coincided with my music fandom going to a different level. I was in high school, and I think back to the concerts I saw, Lollapalooza, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, Our Lady Peace, and other alternative rock bands of the day. And at the same time discovering email, chatrooms, and websites. I lived through the era, now 30 years later I did campus radio, I wrote for Spill, and other defunct websites. I had my own blog, completelyignored.com, which I ran for many years. I became a frequent guest on Toronto Mike podcasts. That was all the stuff in my free time, and professionally I worked in communications and was head of communications for Twitter Canada.

“It was kind of fun when there were just websites, chatrooms, Yahoo groups, and we all had iPods. Some of us were using Napster or visiting mp3 blogs, and it is unfortunate that a lot of this is lost to time. So, I started thinking about this, and thought ‘we really need some archiving of this stuff’. Because if you know where to look, some of this stuff is still out there but there is not a single source of truth at this moment for Canadian music fans, of which I was. So, why am I doing this? It is a passion project. I know many people lived through this era and were big fans of the music who would enjoy seeing a lot of this stuff again.”

During this time the way music was heard, both at home and on the radio, changed a great deal. Albums gave way to cassettes which gave way to CDs which paved the way for streaming and downloads.

VISIT TRACK CHANGES ON INSTAGRAM

“When you think of every facet if you are a music fan. In the 1990s, if you were a music fan, you were buying CDs, probably at HMV or Sam The Record Man. You are buying concert tickets, probably going to Ticketmaster. For music news you are listening to the radio or reading the Toronto Star or Exclaim!. That was the experience. Little by little, the internet transformed every one of those experiences. All of sudden, you have this thing called Napster, and you can find a lot of music for the price point of zero dollars. Then a couple of years later, there is this thing called iTunes and an iPod. All of sudden you’re putting your Sony Sports Walkman in the closet, because now you have an iPod. If you look at the years this project covers, 1990 to 2010, the latter years you have MySpace, and social media, and you are learning about bands through social media. And that gets us into the age of Facebook and Twitter. Another big factor is YouTube, the biggest music website on earth. It is all these things that are totally mainstream and taken for granted now, but that was a lot altogether.”

And Canada entered into the digital age as well, trying to create their own music scene here in Canada. “You may remember Pure Tracks, which for a time was a Canadian equivalent to iTunes. You talk about the rise and fall of Blackberry, some of the things they were doing for music. All this stuff happened within a 20-year period, and a lot of the artifacts that told this story aren’t out there, because the internet has changed so much. The internet has turned over several times.”

The true detective starts trying to find all of the old material on the internet. “It’s interesting because I have been collecting things for a few years, and I have these massive files on my MacBook. There are a few places that have been very helpful. First and foremost, The Internet Archive and their Wayback Machine, which is an archive of old websites. When you see a lot of the old websites I have posted on Instagram and Facebook for Track Changes, a lot of them I salvaged from The Wayback Machine, which goes back to 1996. So, some of the old record labels, bands, music festivals, shows…you can find versions of those websites. They are not always perfect because, keep in mind, when you are going back 20-25 years, these websites are using things like Flash or optimized for Netscape, technologies we don’t use anymore. But the bones of a lot of websites are still out there. Some of the other material I have been going the old school route and going to the Toronto Reference Library and looking at old magazines of Shift magazine, which folks of a certain vintage will recall, was almost Canada’s version of Wired magazine. It is a really interesting look back as to how we are even talking about this new world called ‘The Internet’ circa the mid-1990s.”

“Very little on the internet is forever. Stuff comes and goes and most of the stuff will not be around.”

Gordon is in the process of developing something very important to music fans and history buffs. The internet has an amazing amount of information and data that is at risk of being lost forever. Gordon is trying to change that. “It is for anybody who lived through those times, or people who are just curious about those times. There’s a whole younger generation that didn’t get to experience this. But this is history, it is part of our shared history, both as Canadians and music fans. So, it has been really fun putting it all together and sharing it with the world and whoever else wants to share in that experience.”

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