Great content is an incredible gift to the world. The people who create it—the writers, musicians, and thinkers—make the world immeasurably better. But while the difficulty of creating something truly great is widely recognized, what often gets overlooked is how valuable it is to preserve, curate, and make accessible the great content that already exists that is in jeopardy of being lost, or often, is simply inaccessible.

Not everyone can be a legendary musician or a brilliant writer, but nearly anyone who consumes a lot of content can contribute in a meaningful way—by simply archiving, curating, or making great content easier to find. Making “best of” lists, re-sharing valuable work so it doesn’t disappear when websites go down, or just helping new audiences discover the best material—all of these are small acts that add up to something significant.

Which makes it all the more puzzling that so many content creators seem completely detached from their own work, making no effort to preserve it or to guide newcomers toward their best material. Why is this so common?

I listen to a lot of jazz music and jam bands—genres where each show is largely improvisational and distinct from the next. These artists exist primarily through their live performances. In this world, it’s relatively common for fans to tape shows or for the artists themselves to sell concert recordings from each show.

Over an artist’s career, spanning many years, they accumulate an entire body of music that only exists in live concert recordings. Within this corpus, some shows are far better regarded than others, some have significantly better audio quality, some have stand-out jams and some feature songs (for many of these bands, actually 100+ songs) that fans loved that never made it onto a commercial release.

For massively popular artists like Phish, the Grateful Dead, or Miles Davis, nearly every show is recorded—often with fans rating them, making it easier to find standout performances. Fans also compile the best jams and songs into accessible compilations, and provide guides to introduce new listeners.

But for most artists, once their initial momentum fades, their music effectively disappears. It might survive on a few people’s hard drives or in old BitTorrent taper-trader communities—where you have to hope someone is still seeding it. Some bands allow their concerts to be streamed on Archive.org, which seems like a long-term solution, but this entire dynamic presents two major problems:

• A lot of this music simply vanishes over time.
• Even when it doesn’t, it becomes completely unorganized—meaning there’s no easy way to know which shows are worth listening to, which recordings are the best, or which versions of songs stand out. There’s also little guidance for newcomers on where to even start or where to find this content.

If someone is deeply involved in these music scenes, they might have ways to navigate this—by searching message boards like PhantasyTour or Steve Hoffman forums, or asking around and maybe getting a private spreadsheet of recordings from an amateur archivist enthusiast of some particular band. If the band is on Archive.org, they can sort all recordings by most streamed, or if they’re lucky, they might find a buried comment from a 2005 show, listing the best shows of that year, with a link to a fan forum that is no longer accessible on the web.

The core problem is that artists defined by their live performances often make hundreds of concert recordings available—beloved and analyzed by fans, each with varying quality and hidden gems. But once the artist stops touring and their fanbase dwindles, all of this information is susceptible to getting lost—including, in many cases, the recordings themselves.

I’ve noticed a similar phenomenon in blogging. Many of my favorite bloggers never curate a list of their best or most relevant posts. And when their blogs go offline—like what happened with Joseph Heath—they don’t seem to care about ensuring their work is properly archived, leading to the erasure of a huge amount of valuable content.Heck, even I don’t have a list of my best blog posts on my own website.

So why is it that those who create such great content seem to care so little about making it available for others, especially when it seems so easy for them to do so?

Some possible explanations:

• Creators make content for themselves and for commercial reasons, but not to please potential fans outside of these two concerns. The act of creating is about getting something out of their system, experiencing a particular mental state in the moment. Once the content is out there and feels stale, they don’t care about it anymore—unless there’s a strong financial incentive.
• Even the minimal effort to curate and link to this content is too much. Organizing and hosting content takes some work, and even if it’s trivial, most people won’t bother.
• It belongs to a past chapter of the artist’s life. The content was part of a specific period, and they don’t feel any connection to it anymore. They’re done with it and don’t want to revisit it.
• They’re embarrassed by their old work. They’d rather it disappear than be rediscovered.
• Curation feels like an impure act. Selecting the “best” means making judgments and leaving things out—something some creators would rather avoid, even if it’s as simple as saying: “These were the most listened to/viewed” or “Here are the recordings with the best sound quality.”

Archiving, curating, and making content accessible should be seen as as a valuable act, and I wish more people, namely the creators themselves, would care much more about doing this.