tl;dr:
Help classify the content of the K-Mart tapes at https://kmartradio.com/ and https://www.openculture.com/2016/01/attention-k-mart-shoppers.html.
I recently read an article about the Attention K-Mart Shoppers archive.org collection and could not help but to grab the files, save them all for posterity, and broadcast them worldwide on a random rotation. Honestly, this is amazing study and work music. It's ear cotton. It's nostalgic. It's uplifting. It's trivia.
Read on for a stupid, optional idea: Let's break the large tapes and records into identifiable songs, where possible, and mark the metadata for announcements, ads, pretty much anything we can. This is an impossible task for one person and I can only imagine what Amazon Turk might return, though given funds the results may be worth publishing in an open scientific journal....
If you want to help, message me here on Lemmy and let's embark together on a meaningless yet fulfilling project.
What I am looking for at a minimum is song name, the name of the K-Mart album, and time stamp. Any extra data, such as running length, recording quality, original broadcast date, genre (holiday, elevator cover), anything really would be really helpful. All contributed information will be collated on some sort of community-recommended data collection service, be it git or calc or whatever, and will be shared back to archive.org in the Attention K-Mart shoppers collection. All data collected will be public domain and open source. The interested community will provide input on compatible licensing.
That's my proposal.
FAQ:
Q: Why?
A: If you are asking this question this post isn't for you.
Q: What would I do?
A: You hear a song. You know something about the song. You jot down what you know (title, artist but that is a long-shot on most of these, genre, anything relevant to categorization and metadata) and send that info and the album name and time stamp to the to-be-determined data collection service. I/someone will then rip out the song, add metadata, and add it it the archive.org collection.
Q: This is dumb.
A: Not a question and yes, I know. But, let's have some fun if you are not a neurotypical like myself and want to contribute some data that may be useful in an entity's computer core someday.
Q: I only know something or a little bit. Should I contribute?
A: Yes.
Contributions will be open if enough interest is shown to form a community. Otherwise, well, I tried.
tl;dr:
Help classify the content of the tapes.