About Us

Preserving the Footage That Shaped Music History

DeepCutsArchive is a hand-curated collection of rare musician footage that most fans have never seen — studio sessions, candid interviews, rehearsals, soundchecks, backstage moments, and behind-the-scenes clips from across the decades.

Our Mission

Every day, rare footage of legendary musicians disappears from the internet. YouTube channels go dark. Facebook groups are deleted. Private collections gather dust. DeepCutsArchive exists to find, organise, and preserve these clips before they're lost forever.

We believe that a grainy 1973 rehearsal tape of Led Zeppelin working through a new arrangement, or a candid backstage interview with Miles Davis between sets, is just as valuable to music history as any officially released documentary. These are the moments that reveal how music was really made — unpolished, unscripted, and often unseen by the wider world.

What We Collect

We focus exclusively on footage that is genuinely rare, interesting, or historically significant. Our archive includes:

  • Studio sessions— artists recording, mixing, and experimenting in the studio
  • Interviews— press conferences, talk show appearances, radio interviews, and candid conversations
  • Rehearsals & soundchecks— raw, unpolished run-throughs before the show
  • Behind-the-scenes footage— backstage, on tour, in transit, off-guard
  • Rare live performances— early gigs, one-off jam sessions, small venue shows, and TV appearances
  • Home recordings & demos— early sketches of songs that would become classics
  • Instrument-focused footage— isolated tracks, drum cams, guitar cams, clinics, and masterclasses

We do not collect official music videos, full concerts that are widely available, fan-made edits, reaction videos, or audio-only recordings. Every clip in the archive has been reviewed to ensure it meets our standard for rarity and historical interest.

How It Works

DeepCutsArchive does not host any video files. Every clip is embedded directly from its source platform — primarily YouTube, with additional footage from TikTok, Facebook, and the Internet Archive. The original creators retain full control of their content.

Our team uses a combination of manual curation and automated discovery to find rare footage across the internet. We cross-reference multiple music databases — including Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, Discogs, and Last.fm — to build comprehensive artist profiles with accurate biographies, discographies, and band member information.

Every clip is categorised by artist, genre, decade, year, content type (interview, studio, live, etc.), and, where possible, the recording location. This lets you explore the archive in the way that makes sense to you — whether that's diving into 1960s jazz interviews or finding every rehearsal clip of your favourite drummer.

Community & Contributions

The archive grows through community contributions. Anyone can submit a clip they've found, and we review every submission to ensure it meets our quality standards. You can also request an artist you'd like to see added — we'll research their discography and track down rare footage.

Contributors who submit approved clips are credited on our Contributors page. The archive is richer because of the knowledge and passion of music fans around the world.

Who's Behind This

DeepCutsArchive is a personal project created and maintained by Jamie McDonnell — a lifelong music enthusiast with a particular fascination for the obscure, behind-the-scenes side of music history. The kind of footage that makes you feel like you're in the room.

The project started from a simple frustration: there's an incredible amount of rare musician footage scattered across the internet, but no single place that collects, organises, and preserves it. YouTube search is unreliable for finding this kind of content — and when you do find it, the channel might be gone next month. DeepCutsArchive is an attempt to solve that problem.

Copyright & Content Policy

We have deep respect for artists and their work. DeepCutsArchive embeds videos from public platforms using their official embed APIs — we never download, re-upload, or host video files ourselves. If an original uploader removes their video, it is automatically removed from our archive.

If you are an artist, rights holder, or content creator and would like a clip removed, please contact us at copyright@deepcutsarchive.com and we will remove it promptly, typically within 24 hours.

Get in Touch

Have a question, suggestion, or just want to share a great find? We'd love to hear from you.