Why collegiate music performances deserve a permanent home.
It started with a song I wanted to learn on the piano.
I was searching for a piece by Yoko Shimomura — one of the most celebrated composers in the world, best known for Kingdom Hearts. I found the song. I wanted to learn it. Then I went looking for sheet music and a collegiate performance to study — and hit a wall. Redirected from site to site. Eventually found what I needed, but only after a search that should have taken seconds took much longer.
And then it hit me — almost all at once. A fusion of YouTube and Spotify, with sheet music and collegiate performances. I started thinking about how that would even work. If a piece wasn't in the archive yet and a school uploaded it, their performance would be the sole entry — the de facto reference recording for that piece. Then what happens when a second school submits theirs? A third? You'd need a way to surface the best ones.
"That's when the awards emerged — not as a feature I designed, but as a problem the archive demanded I solve. The Rostrum Awards weren't planned. They were inevitable."
I assumed this was just a problem for small programs without resources. Then I looked at what the best-funded music school in America does. Yale School of Music livestreams over 200 concerts per year. On their own website, they state: "Due to licensing and performance restrictions, most concerts are only available during the livestream. We are unable to offer archived concerts."
The problem isn't funding. It isn't technology. It's that no one has built the right infrastructure — a permanent, independent record that lives outside any single institution's walls. That's what The Rostrum builds.
A recording might exist on a department YouTube channel somewhere. A program might be in a PDF. But there's no permanent, independent record. No national standard for what great looks like. No body that says — this ensemble, this season — that was one of the best in the country.
The Grammys exist. The Tonys exist. The Heisman Trophy exists. But an awards body governed directly by directors — radically transparent, merit-based, blind-judged, open to the community college and the Ivy League alike — did not exist. Until now.
I believe music heals. In a fractured world, music holds the entire spectrum of human experience. There is an underserved community of collegiate musicians who pour years of their lives into work that deserves to be remembered. The Rostrum exists to make sure it is.
This thesis is supported by peer-reviewed evidence. A 2024 Pew Research Center analysis found that 25% of all webpages that existed between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible. For content from 2013, the rate is 38%. Research through the Starling Lab for Data Integrity found that 72% of links from 1998 are now dead.
A 2024 study published in eLife found significant prestige bias in unblinded academic review — and that bias materially reduced when institutional identity was concealed from evaluators. The Rostrum's blind judging methodology is adapted directly from this research.
The Arts Education Data Project found that over 3.6 million students lack access to music education, with disparities concentrated in communities that are already under-resourced. Open access is not a marketing position — it is a research-informed structural choice.
"The archive that should have existed for the last fifty years begins now."
The full research companion essay — "The Archival Silence" — with complete citations is available upon request.
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