A Little History
Waaayyyy back in the '95-'97 era, there were two main hip-hop music archives on the Web:
- The Sandbox Discographies - hosted by Mercer on his Sandbox site. These were a plain-text DETAILED listing of the entire catalogue of LPs & 12s of about 70 hip-hop artists. A very useful resource for DJs & consumers who needed the track listing of a certain obscure 12" release
or just wanted to check out all LPs released by an artist to date.
- Sean's Massive Hip-Hop Site - hosted by, myself, Sean Flynn on a combination of the Ottawa University website and my PC/28.8 kbps Modem based webserver out of my house. This was more of a multi-media approach to archiving info on approx. 50 hip-hop artists out there. I had
pictures, real audio, funky backgrounds...the whole nine.
But by themselves, each website had its drawbacks. Although Mercer's site was very useful, it wasn't very interactive with the user (plain text does that to you). Although my site may have been fun to look at & play with, it was lacking the depth of material that is needed to really make it a useful resource. Couple that with an extremely
low hit count on my site (1000-2000 hits over '96...ouch!), and you have a lot of hard work going unnoticed and not realizing its full potential.
But at 6:46 pm on April 17, 1997, this was all about to change...
Mercer got in touch with me via email and proposed that I take over the discographies and integrate my soundfiles & images with his discographies. Needless to say, I was delighted with the offer...and proceeded full steam ahead to try & round up over 1000 LPs & 12"s, scan the cover artwork, record all significant soundfiles, and upload them to
the Sandbox website...but believe me, this is way easier said than done.
For the most part, rounding up the LPs (in CD Format), scanning the covers, and recording the soundclips was relatively painless. It required a few hours of sheer grunt work, but that was about it. However, to set these multimedia discographies apart from every other page out there on the WWW, you gotta document the 12"s, promos, and wierd-ass
EPs released by each group. This is where the big problems occurred:
- CD covers are a little under 5X5 inches in size. 12" covers are a little over 12X12 inches in size. Try fitting a 12" cover into a scanner that can only feed paper as wide as 8.5 inches...
- A lot of 12"s are pressed in very limited quantities. Within 5 months of their release...boom...they're out of print. Try hunting down 400 of these from the '86 - '95 era...
- CD's are quite simple to record from...just pop 'em into the CD player of your PC. Unfortunately, 12" singles don't work in one of those...
- And lastly, there's the whole issue of economics. While Mercer & I aren't starving to death, we aren't prepared to pay $100 for an original clear vinyl copy of De La's "Clear Lake Audiotorium". Although this is the type of material people will be checking for on our discographies,
you have to draw the line somewhere...
Although we were promising that all 75 discographies were going to be fully released on August 1st, 1997...you can imagine why we didn't even come close to meeting this goal. Nearly a year later, we've managed to crank out a little over 15 discographies (and these aren't entirely complete either).
Maybe, if Mercer & I spent 16 hrs a day working on the Sandbox-Massive, we could have released all 75 by now...unfortunately, we have lives.
So anyways, this project is far from dead. It's at a new home: www.sandboxmassive.com with a few more key discographies uploaded. In addition, there are some other interesting side projects such as the two online mix-shows hosted by myself and fellow Ottawa DJ, DJ El-Karam.
We hope everyone enjoys these discographies...we think you will discover how valuable a resource these will be for years to come.
Sean Flynn - Co-Founder of the Sandbox-Massive.
[Back to the Sandbox-Massive homepage][Email Sean]