Copy the Code, Take It With You

A reader named Stephen asked the obvious question: why post music videos you love and then keep them locked to a single page, when they could be embedded anywhere? The answer, when actually examined, was that there was no good reason at all.

There was a genuine ethos in the early music blog world around sharing—you found something good, you posted it, and if you could make it embeddable, someone else would carry it somewhere else, and the thing would spread the way good things sometimes still could before algorithms decided what moved and what stayed buried. This journal ran on that principle. Whether Lykke Li, Bat for Lashes, or Robyn: the whole point was always to get the thing out into the world, not to hoard it behind a branded interface.

A few late nights, enough Club Mate to fuel a small data center, and suddenly everything was portable. Copy the code from the corner of any video, drop it into your own site, adjust the dimensions if needed, done. Robyn on your blog, Lykke Li on someone else’s, Bat for Lashes in some corner of the web no algorithm was curating. The server held. The idea worked.

That’s still how I think sharing should function—frictionless, mutual, slightly chaotic. Not a walled garden with a branded experience and terms of service longer than the video itself. Just: here’s something I love, take it.