📼 Why "The Deleted Years"
For years, I've been hauling around a collection of artifacts: CDs, cassettes, minidiscs, records, posters, concert ticket stubs and VHS tapes of bands I've seen, performed with, or toured behind. Most of them are recordings of bands I played with or shows I witnessed since first getting involved in the Toronto music scene around 1998.
I've carted them from place to place for so long now it's become ridiculous. Apartment to apartment, city to city — boxes that always seemed too important to leave behind, but too much effort to ever really deal with.
This was the time when many of us were downloading music off Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Grooveshark — like we were afraid that if we didn't grab as much as we could, we'd never hear that music again. Shortly after, contemporary streaming and social media started taking hold. The iPod died. The smartphone took over.
Since then, bands have broken up, blogs and websites have disappeared, and entire chapters of local music history have just blinked out of existence. Sure, some recordings can still be found if you look hard enough — but mostly, if they still exist at all, they're scattered around in dusty boxes in parents' basements, frozen on old hard drives and dead iPods, or stuck on poorly-labelled CD-Rs that nobody can play anymore.
If you're anything like the average person in 2025, you've most likely lost track of or entirely forgotten about many of the bands you enjoyed in that era. Maybe you saw them live. Maybe you downloaded an online-only single from a message board and it just lived in your old iTunes library — but now that single, and possibly the whole band, is just lost to time.
That's what this project is all about.
📸 The Collection
The physical archive spans roughly 25 years of Toronto music. The formats are period-appropriate — no one was handing out USB drives in 2002.
All audio is being digitized, cleaned up in the studio, tagged, and archived as close to the original as possible. Nothing is being remastered or altered — just restored to listenable quality where the source is degraded.
🕐 The Era: A Timeline
📢 How to Contribute
The hope is that what starts as one person's personal vault eventually grows into a community archive — a place where others can contribute their own lost recordings and forgotten shows.
If you played in a Toronto-area band between 2000 and 2010, or if you have recordings, photos, posters, flyers, ticket stubs, or just memories — we want to hear from you. Everything gets credited and preserved properly. No monetization. No algorithms. Just the music.
What we're looking for:
Audio recordings (any format) · Band photos · Gig posters & flyers · Set lists · Stories and memories
⚠ Your Music, Your Choice
If you find your band, your recordings, or your likeness on this site and would prefer it removed, we will honour that request — no questions asked. This is an archive built out of love for the music, not a platform for anyone's discomfort.
That said, we'd genuinely love to talk first. A lot of this music has never been heard outside of a handful of shows. We believe it deserves to exist in the world, and we'd rather find a solution that keeps it up — whether that means correcting credits, adjusting what's shown, or finding a way to present it that you're comfortable with.
To request a removal or discuss your listing: use the submit form or email us directly. We'll respond promptly.