Music, Video Games and News Archives Are Vanishing From Public Access, Internet Archive Report Finds

Decades of music journalism and a huge slice of video game history have quietly disappeared from public access in recent years, according to a new Internet Archive report on cultural preservation.

Titled Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record, the study argues that the shift from owning media outright to accessing it through streaming platforms and temporary licensing deals has left huge parts of modern culture vulnerable to disappearing following corporate decisions.

The report points to research from the Pew Research Center showing that a quarter of webpages that existed at some point between 2013 and 2023 were no longer accessible as of October 2023, and argues that music, video games and television news are among the categories particularly exposed to this kind of loss.

MTV News: Two Decades of Music Journalism Vanished in a Day

In June 2024, Paramount Global pulled its long-running MTV News website offline, removing more than two decades of music journalism from public access.

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine had already preserved more than 470,000 pages from MTV News dating back to 1997, along with 70,000 pages from sister site CMT News. Without that archive, the report notes, the sites would have been lost from public access for good, since there is no other comparable public archive of what was published there.

The report warns that the Wayback Machine cannot capture everything, meaning similar shutdowns elsewhere may already have erased material with no surviving public copy.

Musicians Fight Back as Streaming Services Remove Songs Over Fraud Claims

Musicians have faced a different kind of vanishing act. Variety reported in April 2024 that streaming services had removed songs from independent and signed artists alike after automated systems flagged suspected streaming fraud.

Managers interviewed by Variety said their artists had not engaged in fraudulent activity, yet had little way of challenging the decisions, since streaming services generally do not disclose the precise criteria used by their fraud-detection systems. For artists whose income depends heavily on streaming royalties, a takedown can mean losing access to recordings and associated revenue while disputes are resolved.

Nearly Nine in Ten Classic Video Games Are Not Commercially Available

Video games fare worse still. A 2023 study by the Video Game History Foundation, carried out with the Software Preservation Network and cited in the Internet Archive's report, examined about 4,000 historical titles released before 2010 and found that only around 13 per cent remained commercially available.

That means close to nine in ten historic games are not currently available for purchase, leaving players dependent on ageing hardware, second-hand copies or other means of accessing games that rights holders have not made commercially available. The study found that commercial availability falls below 3 per cent for games released before 1985.

The findings do not mean that 87 per cent of these games no longer exist anywhere. Rather, the study measures their lack of commercial availability and highlights the difficulties involved in legally preserving and providing public access to older games.

Game designer Jordan Mechner, a contributor to the Internet Archive's report, put the wider problem bluntly, writing that 'historical oblivion is the default, not the exception' to the human record.

The report's authors argue that this is not simply a concern for historians and archivists. As culture increasingly lives behind subscription paywalls or on servers that companies can switch off without notice, ordinary readers, viewers and listeners risk losing access to material they once took for granted, with no guarantee that it will return.

The Internet Archive is calling on lawmakers and rights holders to strengthen legal protections for public-serving libraries and archives, arguing that decisions over what culture survives should not rest with media companies alone. It also encourages individuals to support open-access community archiving projects, so smaller and niche corners of culture are not left out of the record entirely.