The intro music outlasted everything else
Twenty‑five years of digital work, mostly dust. Twelve seconds of theme music, still here. Part one of a two‑part essay.
In 1998 I was Editor of the Business section of lineone.net, an internet portal that had been built by a committee of three companies who agreed on almost nothing—News International, BT, and United News & Media—and that ran out of the News International compound at Wapping. Every weekday I recorded a short audio bulletin. The day’s market summary, packaged as streaming audio, embedded on the Business page so anyone with a subscription could click and listen in their browser.
This was years before broadband. Years before smartphones. Years before anyone said the word “podcast.” Adam Curry and Dave Winer wouldn’t ship the technology that defined podcasting until 2003. The term itself wasn’t coined until February 2004, by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian, and even then he buried it in the middle of a paragraph because he wasn’t sure it would catch on. He had reasonable doubts. We all did.
I left lineone in 1999 and came home to Australia. The bulletins kept going without me for a while, and then they stopped, and then the whole subscriber‑side editorial operation was absorbed into Tiscali, and then Tiscali was absorbed into TalkTalk, and somewhere in that chain of corporate digestion the actual work I had made dissolved completely. Today, if you type lineone.net into a browser, you get ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED. The server hangs up on you before you can even ask what you wanted. There is something almost dignified about it. The site has the good manners to admit it is dead.
The work I made there is not on the open web. It is not in the Wayback Machine either, because the public‑facing front page was just a login redirect, and the Internet Archive’s crawler didn’t have a subscription. Four thousand two hundred and one captures of lineone.net between 1998 and 2018, and not a single one of them shows the Business section as it actually existed. The crawler had been very thoroughly photographing the lobby of a building it couldn’t get into.
This is the part of the story that should land harder than it usually does. A national daily audio news bulletin, produced inside one of the largest media organisations in the English‑speaking world, broadcast for an unknown number of months to an unknown number of subscribers, and there is no record. Not because nobody tried to archive it. Because the people building the archiving tools, in entirely good faith, could not get past the authentication wall. By the time the tools improved, the content had been deleted, migrated, or quietly folded into a corporate transition that nobody bothered to document. The work was real. The work was sometimes good. The work is gone.
This is not a lineone problem. This is the whole subscription‑portal era of the late 1990s. AOL keywords, CompuServe forums, MSN content, early Times Online before it went free, anything behind a login on any of the big consumer ISPs of the era. Functionally lost. A whole generation of online editorial work that exists now only in the memories of the people who made it, and even those memories are getting unreliable, because we are now most of us in our sixties and seventies and the memory is the next thing to go after the hosting bill.
I am, statistically, one of those people. So are a lot of writers and editors you have never heard of, who shipped daily into the void and then watched the void close behind them. There is no LinkedIn skill for “made things in a format the archive couldn’t reach.” There ought to be. We are a sizeable cohort. We could have our own conference, except none of us could remember where we’d held it.
In March 2005 I started a blog. Three weeks later, on 5 April 2005, I launched a podcast called Better Communication Results. By then the technology existed. Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code had been running since August 2004. Libsyn had launched in October 2004 as the first proper podcast host. Apple wouldn’t add podcasts to iTunes until June 2005, two months after my first episode. I was in the first wave—small, scrappy, before the gold rush, before the optimisers, before the people who would later sell other people online courses about how to launch your own first‑wave podcast retrospectively. I published weekly for years.
Later that same year, Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz invited me to become a correspondent for For Immediate Release: The Hobson & Holtz Report, then one of the most listened‑to corporate communications podcasts in the English‑speaking world. I was their first. They hadn’t had correspondents before me. The model didn’t exist. Every correspondent who came after—Dan York in New Hampshire, Michael Netzley in Singapore, David Phillips in England, Eric Schwartzman in Los Angeles, Donna Papacosta in Toronto, Bob LeDrew also in Toronto, Sallie Goetsch in California, Mark Story in Washington DC—followed the template Neville and Shel built around what worked with me. I reported from Adelaide for three years, until early 2008, and occasionally beyond.
In July 2006 I joined YouTube and started making what we then called ‘vidcasts’, before the term mutated through ‘vlog’ and was eventually absorbed into the catch‑all ‘podcast’, where it now sits awkwardly alongside its older audio‑only cousin like a teenage stepchild nobody quite knew where to seat at the table. Different word, different decade, same impulse. Be early to the format, before the format has rules.
My BCR MP3s are gone. So are the early FIR episodes from 2005 and 2006. Not because anyone deleted them with malice but because audio hosting in that era was attached to whatever Libsyn or RawVoice or self‑hosted server happened to be cheap that month, and twenty years is longer than any of those infrastructures was built to last. The metadata survived—show notes, episode titles, dates, the testimony of Hobson and Holtz crediting me as their first correspondent in their eighth‑anniversary tribute post from January 2013, still live on their site today, describing me with characteristic generosity as “our man in the Adelaide Hills, reporting from Australia from 2005 until early 2008.” The audio itself is dust. Modern podcasters whose hosts go bust at least have backup conventions, mirror tools, archive services, retrieval scripts, a whole cottage industry of people who will help you not lose your work. We had none of that, because we were the people who would in due course write the cottage industry into existence by losing all of ours first.
One artefact survived intact, by accident. In August 2011, Shel Holtz flew from California to Sydney and recorded a six‑minute video interview with me about Twitter and Symbolic Convergence Theory, which was the doctoral research I was doing at the University of South Australia at the time, and which never finished because Second Life collapsed and the field I was studying disappeared underneath me like a card table folding mid‑hand. The MP4 still serves from Libsyn’s CDN as I write this. If you click the link too late it will be gone. That is not a metaphor. The URL is signed and time‑limited and the expiry timestamp is a real number. The internet’s transition from open URLs to signed URLs over the past decade has quietly destroyed an enormous amount of casual accessibility to old work, in much the same way that turning a door into a door with a lock destroys casual access to the room behind it.
My earliest YouTube video is still up though, from 12 June 2007. Eighteen years it has been sitting there, unmolested, unwatched by anyone except possibly the algorithm, slowly accumulating the patina of a thing nobody knows what to do with. YouTube is the survivor of that whole generation of self‑hosted experiments. It ate the field. The things that lived inside it lived. Most of what was outside it didn’t.
What survives, from all of those eras, is the intro music and the outro music. Twelve seconds of opening theme. A similar tag at the end. I bought them somewhere along the way and kept reusing them, because they were mine and because they sounded right and because reusing them was easier than starting over, which is also the founding principle of most of human culture, when you think about it for long enough.
The same theme that opened a News International business bulletin in 1998 was still opening shows in the mid‑2000s, the late 2000s, the early 2010s, a handful of false starts that never made it past episode one, and a couple of things in between that I am not going to write about here because some failures should be allowed to stay private. It is still on a hard drive in Đà Lạt, Vietnam, in 2026. The infrastructure that hosted it is gone. The corporate parents that funded it are gone or have changed identity three times. The subscribers who once listened are mostly retired now, and the ones who aren’t have forgotten me, and the ones who haven’t forgotten me have forgotten the bulletin, which is what is supposed to happen and is no slight against anyone. The audio files themselves are dust.
The opening twelve seconds survived because they were on my hard drive, not theirs.
There is a lesson in here that I keep trying to write around, because writing toward it directly makes it sound smug, and it isn’t smug, it is just true. If you make things on platforms you don’t own, you are renting your own past from someone whose interests are not aligned with yours. When their interests change—and their interests always change—your work disappears. The landlord throws out the boxes you left in the basement. This is not unkind of them. They have a building to run. They were never the right person to be looking after your boxes.
You can’t always avoid this. Sometimes the platform is where the audience is, where the budget is, where the work has to live to matter at the moment it matters. I made the lineone bulletins on News International’s infrastructure because that’s where the audience was in 1998, and I would do it again, and so would you. You don’t always have a choice. You very rarely have a choice. The choice you do have is what you keep on your own machine afterwards.
The small things—the masters, the source files, the intro music, the outtakes, the things nobody else thinks are valuable, the things that are too unimportant for the legal department to argue about—those you keep. Those you carry. Those become the thread that runs through everything afterwards. Treat the small things as the things.
People sometimes ask me why I bother with a personal domain that has been continuously registered since March 2001, when nobody reads personal blogs anymore. The honest answer is that I have watched too much of my own work dissolve on other people’s machines, and the domain is the one piece of infrastructure I can promise will still exist next year, because I will still be the one paying for it. The Wapping printworks no longer prints anything. Tiscali is a footnote. TalkTalk has been sold for parts more times than I can count. leehopkins.com persists, because every March a small amount of money leaves my bank account and is accepted by a registrar that does not care about me, in exchange for the continued use of nine letters and a full stop. That transaction has outlived three of the four largest media companies I ever worked for. It will probably outlive me.
The intro music is the same answer in a different form.
The pattern is older than the podcasts, of course. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I was running the social media practice that grew out of the lineone work, I would sit across the desk from Australian CEOs and try to explain why they needed a website. “We have a fax machine,” they would say, with the air of a man producing a winning chess move. “Why would I want a website?”
In the mid‑to‑late 2000s, the same conversation, different topic. I would try to explain to CEOs why they needed to be on social media. “Why would I want social media? I already have a website.” The website by this point had usually been built in 1999 and had not been touched since. It featured a photograph of the chairman taken in front of a curtain, and a list of the company’s office phone numbers, and very little else. They were proud of it. They would still be proud of it in 2014, the last time anyone looked at it.
In the late 2010s, the same conversation again. “Why would I want a podcast? We have a newsletter.” The newsletter was a quarterly PDF the IT department had to attach to an email because nobody had budget for an email‑marketing platform. It had clip art.
And now, in 2026, from very far away in Vietnam, the conversation has rotated one more turn. I try to explain to CEOs why they need to get serious about AI. “Why would I want AI? I already have teams of people researching and writing for me.” Those teams, in most of the conversations I have had, are two people, one of whom has just handed in their notice, the other of whom is using ChatGPT in the bathroom and not telling anyone.
Twenty‑eight years, four refusals, the same conversational shape every time. The fax machine, the website, the social media, the AI. Each one held up as proof that the new thing wasn’t needed, by people who would in a few short years be paying premium consultancy rates to be explained how to catch up. I have stopped arguing. The early edge is a lonely place, and most of the people on it never get paid for being right early. They get paid, if at all, for being late and confident, twenty years later, after the world has caught up to the thing they were already doing, and after they have learned to stop telling people they were doing it before everyone else was.
I keep ending up on the early edge of things, and I keep walking away before the gold rush arrives. I have stopped feeling rueful about this. The early edge is where the interesting work happens, before the formats calcify, before the gurus arrive, before the people show up to flatten everything for SEO and pivot it to short‑form video. Being early is its own reward. You get to make the thing while it is still strange. You get to do it badly without anyone noticing, because nobody yet has a frame of reference for what good would look like. You get to be wrong in public and have it pass for innovation.
You just have to accept that being early is not the same as being remembered.
And that, on the days the loss feels heavy, you will have twelve seconds of opening theme to remind you the work was real.
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A footnote, written in the middle of drafting this piece. I went looking through the archives expecting to find nothing. I found more than I expected. Part two of this essay catalogues what survived, and what I learned about preservation from the looking. Coming next week, assuming I do not lose the notes.
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Notes and sources
On the FIR correspondent timeline. Hobson and Holtz’s eighth‑anniversary tribute post (3 January 2013, still live on forimmediaterelease.biz) credits me as “our man in the Adelaide Hills, reporting from Australia from 2005 until early 2008.” That description captures the regular correspondent role. My contributions continued occasionally afterwards. One recovered example is a five‑minute report on the 2010–11 Queensland floods, recorded Friday 14 January 2011 and broadcast in a FIR episode that same weekend. The audio file survived on my drive. The original FIR episode link is no longer reachable.
On the disappearing artefacts. The Sydney 2011 interview MP4 referenced in the body of this piece was served from Libsyn’s CDN at the time of writing, via a signed URL that expired the same evening. The file was downloaded locally, uploaded to YouTube, and deposited at the Internet Archive before the link expired. The act of writing this piece prompted the preservation work it argues for, which is not lost on me.