Saving classic house music DJ sets from oblivion, one compressed mp3 file at a time.

SYNC is another new feature for 5 Mag, which you can probably describe it in as few words as possible as “a new mix series for old mixes.”

There’s more to it than that, of course. A few years back I wrote an article called “404: The Internet Has A Memory Problem” which attacked the old techno-utopian cliché that things posted on online stay there forever. They don’t: the Internet Archive itself suggests that the average new post stays online for about 100 days.

A great deal of our own mixes and articles have fallen off the internet over the last 18 years. Many pre-date SoundCloud. And we are, among many, scarred up veterans of SoundCloud’s Great DJ Mix Purges as well.

The original article stated why these are important: they are unique and irreplaceable documents of culture recorded as it was happening. We have most if not all of these lost mixes that have disappeared not just from our platform but from the internet as a whole.

The question was always how one goes about restoring them. Post them all at once and you’ve pleased the hoarders but essentially become an archive, drowning listeners in a bunch of vintage recordings that won’t individually get much shine, or overwhelm today’s active DJs that we feature here who need a spotlight too.

Instead we have SYNC, where we’re posting them one at a time with the attention and consideration we give to new mixes, and posted at about the same frequency. We’re starting with the late, great Paul Johnson — as it turns out the first in a “Paul Johnson Series” as we’ve discovered several mixes from 5 Mag’s archives which have totally disappeared off our platform and invisible to Google if not purged from the internet as a whole. This will lead to a special Paul Johnson issue planned for later this year.