Rebuilding the ARC: America’s Largest Collection of Popular Music Launches GoFundMe Campaign

From Rolling Stone:

The day the music died is a lie. Music never dies. It’s the one thing our minds protect at all costs. If only our wallets were so loyal. Now they have a chance to be: This week, the largest popular music collection in America (3 million recordings!) is, for the first time, asking the public for financial help. Is New York’s legacy as a music town worth $100,000? That’s the question the Archive of Contemporary Music is asking.

The Archive is a massive private research library that has been in downtown Manhattan since 1985, when Bob George balked at the price of rent in SoHo — $100 a month — and instead took over a $65 a month space in what would become TriBeCa, where bums burned wood in 50-gallon drums. “It had no walls, no ceiling, no floors, no electricity, nothing,” he tells Rolling Stone. “We built it ourselves. We made this place with our own determination.”

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For the first time in a generation, the archive is now asking the public for help: On Monday, it launched a $100,000 GoFundMe (supported by a $50,000 dollar-for-dollar matching grant from the Jaharis Family Foundation). The money aims to avoid eviction by paying $90,000 in owed rent that the archive has built up since its rent jumped in 2016 from about $10,000 a month to $21,000 a month, George says. “What’s crazy,” he adds, “is that it’s still a deal; well below market value. But the city has become a place where even deals are unaffordable.”

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See Also: Rebuilding the ARC! (via ARC Website)

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Filed under: Academic Libraries, Funding, Libraries, News