IA makes the most sense in the spirit of preservation.
replyEtree (https://www.etree.org/ ) is the longest running torrent site for tapes. It looks like only about 5% of the hundred thousand torrents have any seeders at all. Not sure how reliable requesting a seed is. I’d expect long tail stuff to get “effectively lost”. Versus IA whose purpose and funding is preservation, in addition to sharing.
This is a fun area, as the DMCA, for its flaws included a loophole for non-commercial distribution of live concert recordings. The only requirement is that it isn't an exact copy of a commercial release. I am not sure about the exact standards, as live albums often aren't the entire concert. Here are some other sites where people share these tapes.
replySugarmegs is up and running for 30+ years now. I knew the guy who started it back then and he was a Sony employee who "inherited" a T-1 connection that Sony forgot they were paying for... At least for the first few years, when content streams were now profoundly ancient real audio files.
replyEtree is missing self-seed then. What if IA hosted torrents like Etree does but also self-seeded the content?
replyThus they are encouraging amateur third parties to pick up some of the archival slack, that style of torrent could outlive IA in case anything happened to them, and it reduces some of their bandwidth costs
IA always does that. Every download page also links to a torrent. Is that not the same as what you want?
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