In an era when over 100,000 tracks are uploaded to streaming platforms daily, questions of music preservation take on renewed urgency. Amid this unprecedented overflow of recordings, what should be preserved for future generations—and how? This talk examines grassroots preservation practices among independent record labels in Argentina that have turned to cassette tapes to construct community-oriented forms of cultural memory. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, I explore why these fragile, decaying, and precarious forms of music storage are mobilized as a critical response to the algorithmic overabundance of digital circulation. I show how, in the Argentine context, cassette tapes are used to shelter locally produced music amid economic precarity and the resurgence of neoliberal governance through intentional archival practices oriented toward the future.

Bio:

Agustina Checa (she/her/ella) is an ethnomusicologist who serves as Assistant Professor of Music at Lehman College and doctoral faculty at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her research is at the intersection of popular music and media studies examining music technologies, material culture, value, and the infrastructures that sustain independent music in South America. Checa created Magnetismo Sónico, an open-access archive that showcases the work of cassette labels in Latin America and currently directs the Hitchcock Institute for Studies in American Music at CUNY. Her book project builds on years of multi-sited ethnographic research with independent labels that produce and circulate cassette tapes in contemporary Argentina.