What a strange thing - that musicians grant permission to places like Ubuweb, and then because it's free, it'll probably be listened to more often than something that is still wrestling with this idea of making a profit.

Kenny Goldsmith from Ubuweb describes himself as an amateur archivist, and people can download files from Ubuweb - it's not a streaming service. But it's a miracle that it's still online and they're able to make it work through the donations of server space and volunteer efforts.

Records have always been the most extraordinary form of time travel for me, and that's why it matters to know when something was circulated, and if it had an audience of five or 50,000.

My experience that undergirds that observation comes from punk, where people might have scraped together the money to be in the studio for an afternoon to make a record. Punk isn't a music that you think of as chance-based, but exigency has a lot to do with it.

There's a book of interviews with John Cage by Joan Retallack called Musicage that was finished the summer that he died, in 1992. And in one of the last interviews, he was very excited to talk about nanotechnology. There's real technophilia from him, a kind of utopian embrace of the idea that nanotechnology will free people up to do what they really want to do.

There's part of me that is a strict materialist.

The word "archive" seems so reassuring, but I'm not sure about these things that are now being called archives. Is anything lost by the fact that the word has come to mean so many more things.