Archive Team: The Geocities MIDI Collection

[Music Enthusiast]

Here is a huge collection of midi files that were rescued before Geocities was taken down, In total, over 51,000 songs are located in this collection, spanning the full 1995-2009 lifetime of Geocities:

https://archive.org/details/archiveteam-geocities-midi-collection-2009

Below is ver 1.2 of the collection:

https://archive.org/details/TheGeocitiesMidiCollectionVersion1.2

[Vojvodinosaurus]

Cool, are they public domain?

[Saga Musix]

Most definitely not. You can be sure that the last thing teenagers creating Geocities websites in the mid-90s cared about was copyright (and of course Public Domain is a concept that doesn't exist in many jurisdictions). You'll find tons of MIDI files ripped from games, recreations of commercial music, etc... in there, so a lot of material for which the site owners probably didn't even have the permission to upload them.

[Vojvodinosaurus]

bummer 

[Vojvodinosaurus]

i wanted to remix them but im sure even if some are original content their contact info is missing forever so it's pretty much impossible to ask for permission

[Music Enthusiast]

Ya I guess not knowing the copywrite status of each midi file in the collection could be a problem as well as not having the contact info of each composer/artist and many of the midi's are compositions of commercial copyrighted music. I'm somewhat of a digital hoarder, so I often fail to look at those things. Despite all these issues, no one seems to care about this collection as no one has requested archive.org to take it down and it is a fairly well known midi collection on the internet.

Here is a BBS CD called "DR. MUSIC, CDXPRT" by Aces Research, Inc., published in 1993, it is a Music software and Midi, CMF, ROL, MOD, WAV, VOC and SND collection CD for BBS's. I own a physical copy of this CD which I purchased in 1993 or 1994 at Radio Shack if I am remembering right. They have archived a digital copy of this CD which is downloadable from their website:

https://archive.org/details/drmusic

I am not sure how they are able to legally distribute this CD as a digital download.