Not much consideration has been paid to the vast changes taking place in what might be considered the archive of popular music from North Africa, and Algeria in particular. While some important online projects have been developed by state actors, most notably the work of Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a vast and constantly expanding amount of material has also been made available by amateurs (fans, collectors, devotees). These can be found variously on YouTube, SoundCloud, FaceBook, discogs.com, podcasts and other outlets. On YouTube, for instance, one can discover posts of rare recordings, sometimes illustrated by personal snapshots and photos of record jackets, as well as informed commentary and discussion, videos of live performance, recordings of TV interviews with artists, and so on. I’m unaware of any systematic effort to collect and permanently archive this material. Due to rapid changes in how popular music is reproduced, there is also the phenomenon of a “vanishing” archives of music and video cassettes, vinyl recordings, Scopitones (16 mm. film played on a kind of jukebox) and more recently, CDs. Such items (or the latest versions) were once ubiquitous in the marketplace, and have now mostly disappeared, and much has been discarded and rubbished. These are all invaluable sources for a more complex understanding of the significance of popular music of North Africa and its connection to broader economic, cultural and political issues, and we should be concerned, as scholars, about how such archives might be collected and preserved. I will highlight a few cases of how this music might matter, including discussing how an investigation of popular vinyl recordings by Algerian artists, banned by the French colonial security forces during the war of liberation, might expand our understanding of the cultural dimensions of the Algerian struggle.