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them from stealing sites.‖ 184 Aktivista admits to sometimes taking music from the ―stealing sites,‖
i.e. from bloggers who ‗steal‘ the music from other blogs, give no credit to them, and invest no
time into obtaining the records offline. ‗Theft‘ is established by the bloggers through inspecting
the quality of the files (bit rate, artwork scan) and comparing it against their own work.
The time invested into finding music at flea markets, digitising it and making it available online is
immense. Apart from buying records at flea markets, Aktivista gratefully lists his ‗donators,‘ who
help him by providing links to remote sharing sites to the material digitised/uploaded by them. As
of August 2009 the donators are duly listed on the site while some have also become Jugozvuk
editors. Jugozvuk is thus becoming a joint enterprise comprising several devoted preservers of
Yugoslav popular musical heritage and has thus largely outgrown a solitary endeavour. The joint
efforts by several editors and donators thus effectively expand the community and also enable
much better ‗coverage‘ of the material and, not least, improve the prospects of its continual
existence. Apart from time to be invested into digitising the ‗musical artefacts‘ in high quality,
music blogging involves issues of honesty and dignity pertaining to creating and maintaining such
blogs. Genuine effort is rewarded by overt/public appreciation and doing it the easy way is
discouraged and condemned.
Aktivista‘s digital storytelling emanates regret and nostalgia for the times passed which converge
in the posted music, photos and his textual accounts. His posts are thus not only a means to
preserve/archive the music but also a place for expression of his memories, and hence his attitude,
relation to the present. In a way Aktivista (and his donators) perceives himself (and quite rightly
so) to be the ‗messenger of the past,‘ bringing forgotten and/or rare music into the present, saving
it from oblivion. He does so through post composition, which includes the title, record‘s artwork,
text, and the comment function. It is through engagement or convergence of these elements that
the personal relation is established between the author, the posted music and the place/time of its
origin. True, the blog offers little personal information and the recounted memories do not go
much beyond cliché statements such as in ―those times we seemed to have lived more carefree.‖ 185
Nevertheless, referring to the role of music in individual‘s life and the lives of collectivities, and at
the interstices, it is clear that it is the music that is the primary trigger of memories. As scarce as
the posts may be in terms of elaborate personal textual accounts, they nevertheless provide
affective contextualisation of music and endow the very activity of following such a blog,
browsing through posts and downloading music with a particular aura of disinterring, excavating
184 ―RAZNI IZVODJAĈI 1976 Mi smo lmada vojska Titova,‖Jugozvuk, http://jugozvuk.blogspot.com/2009/10/razniizvodjaci-1976-mi-smo-mlada.html,
accessed 8 August 2011.
185 Ibid.
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