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captive-of-the-sun · 11 months ago

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On Successfully Identifying Lostwave Songs

This is a bit different from most of the content that has been and will be here, but I think now is a good time and here is a good place to put my two cents on this out there.

I'm not going to explain in depth what lostwave is right now, because the audience for this is people who already know, but to put it very basically, it's songs that people have part or all of the audio of but don't have identifying information for—the easiest example is a song someone recorded to tape from the radio but didn't catch the name of.

In the past year there have been a number of successfully solved cases—again, I won't list them because of my purpose here, but you can find lists pretty easily. What I want to look at is how these songs are generally found. I've identified a few common methods (the acronyms refer to songs solved this way):

contacting people who might know something — WMT, TWWSE

Brute-force searching (e.g. Discogs, YouTube, SoundCloud, MySpace Dragon Hoard, copyright databases) — a bunch, including Uptown People, Kenya Dance, HLWIT

Combing through possible places of origin (e.g. listening to all songs on a station's playlist, watching a ton of a single type of videos like commercials or pr0n) — EKT, BTB, TRITA

Some, such as Fond My Mind, have been a bit more complicated, but I'd say these are the most common vectors.

Sometimes the searches will go without drama, but the first method in particular can lead to problems. A hype cycle emerges around someone who should be contacted, whether because they know it or because they may be the artist themselves, and people start piling on and harassing the person, intentionally or unintentionally. Often this becomes a problem and can make the process far more difficult than it needs to be. This is something people really need to be aware of: a potential lead is only a potential lead. There's nothing definitive, and you shouldn't get your hopes too high. At the same time, you should evaluate the credibility, because it might be promising or it might be a load of BS. Being too eager or too much of a downer can both be problems.

The success of the lostwave community in the past year is largely due to the number of people invested in it, leading to both more songs being searched for and more people searching for them, and while the cynical answer is that the wild success, the "golden age of lostwave", is just an illusion, I think there's validity to it. Some of the songs have been missing for a while and merely needed more attention paid to them; others were, while not publicly part of a search for as long, seemed unfindable until they weren't (looking at you, Everyone Knows That).

Ultimately, what I'm trying to say is that I've come to see that deeming a lostwave case "unsolvable" is very extreme. If people take a step back and look at how searches have succeeded in the past, we could maybe learn how to better proceed in the future. Perhaps the biggest takeaway goes back to Everyone Knows That being found: someone searched in private (hehe) through a potential pool of sources and found it. While having more people searching is helpful, sometimes the correct path is the one with little hype done away from the spotlight or in secret.

#music #lostwave #longerform

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