The demoscene (and by some extension the classic gaming scene) has faced this from time-to-time. What's interesting is how many large volunteer efforts there ar

The demoscene (and by some extension the classic gaming scene) has faced this from time-to-time. What's interesting is how many large volunteer efforts there are to save large chunks of the visual and audio output of that scene. There are places you can go and get literally hundreds of thousands of pieces of music. Every one in a while a site will need to go down and somebody else seems to step in, mirror the content and start their own thing. Outside of the scene, there are sites with literally thousands of post-copyright mp3s from certain genres (classic jazz, 45s, etc.) so there's definitely a kind of appetite on the part of preservationists to catalog music. There's almost no commercial side to the demoscene though, so I wonder if the commercial forces in the rest of the music world seem to prevent this kind of community building.