Last week a link started floating around to DL the entirety of Lil B’s myspace tracks. Notoriously, B made over 100 profiles and filled them each with a few based freestyles. The 2.5 GB, 676 track, multipart collection (and 20 page tracklist)wasn’t compiled by the based god himself though- it is the work of an obsessive completist and digital archivist named Andrew Dickson. I found Dickson on twitter and quickly realized that his myspace collection wasn’t the first, or even the most ambitious of his archival projects. What drives fandom like this? Why share with the world a prized collection that any Master Chef would be proud of? I hit him with some questions to find out.

T: What other completist type zip folders have you created/curated and posted?

D: I’ve made quite a few and the majority of them are collections of compilation & remix tracks. The only time I ever thought someone would be interested, however, was for my first Hip Hop-related one (a Jay Electronica compilation). The first one ever made was for Aphex Twin, but I’ve done them for (as you said) Lil Wayne, Animal Collective, The Velvet Underground and a few others.

T: Why do this sort of work? How do you understand this sort of archive – when obviously anyone could spend hours dling and parsing through the internet. part of the joy for master chefs seems to be chasing down and completing things themselves, ie spending a lot of time on hulkshare and maybe even arguing numbers re: releases/unreleased leaked whatever based tracks.

D: The initial reasoning is always because I want to complete my own personal collection for whatever artist happens to be the focus. I have quite an organized, lengthy collection of music, and the primary focus in acquiring music has always been ‘the studio album’. As I get more into a band, I want to really hear everything they put out, and I normally spend some time searching and researching just where their material has all gone – normally there are loads of studio tracks that were never officially released on an album. Rather than just downloading a bunch of separate .mp3s, I try to compile and organize them where-ever possible. The idea of sharing them with the internet came from the idea that I’m pretty sure most fans wouldn’t mind one, well-sourced download for, say, all of Lil B’s rare myspace tracks. I completely understand the joy that comes with ‘searching’ for secret tracks, but I also understand that in the future, many of these will be lost. Thinking on it now, I guess you could say future fans of an artist would benefit the most from a time like this. Look at Harry Smith’s collection – after the depression, all this old folk music was lost and the only reference any one had was his collection of 78” records.

Hit the jump for a grip of DL links and the rest of the interview
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