Ripping the pith from the Peel: Institutional and Internet cultures of archiving pop music radio

Although the influential BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel (1939–2004) broadcast on average three times a week for 37 years, until the last four years of his life only a small number of complete recordings of his programmes had been made and preserved by the BBC sound archives. This article seeks to explain the institutional, technological and cultural context behind this absence, and compare it with the recent practice of Internet-enabled fan archiving of shows, based on the restoration and digitization of listeners’ shared off-air cassette recordings.