BalkanMapper
Hey, I'm BalkanMapper
I first became aware of Yugoslav war music around 2015 when stumbling across the Kocayine video for Jadna Bosno suverena, from there on finding channels like Sak0 and artists like Roki Vulović or Baja Mali Knindža. It was all very surface level and just something interesting kept at the back of my mind.
My YouTube channel was made around April 2019 when I started doing mapping videos of dubious quality. Around that time I also regained my interest in Yugoslav war music and started looking a bit deeper into the topic like what albums there are, the history of the conflict itself and artists like Pirgo.
I would go on to buy my first tape, Živeće ovaj narod, on the 11th of February 2020, followed by Srpskim radikalima, Gara iz Nemačke, and many more after that.
Jumping to July 2020 I started uploading one of my rarest tapes, Pesma o Zoranu, followed by Đe si legendo. Little did I know of the beast that is Renome when it comes to copyright. My channel was promptly deleted for copyright infringement. A month later I made my current channel and ever since then have been completely diving head first into this hobby. As of writing, I have more than 200 cassettes and a lot of knowledge of even the most obscure songs.
Discogs
Discogs seems like the perfect site, right? It's a giant database where you can submit albums, their covers and even have a marketplace, well until the event that lead me to make this website.
Around 3 years ago i submitted the album Glas Trebave - Tri planina, tri brata to Discogs, not thinking much of it. Well turns out you're not allowed to submit stuff from the internet and especially not if the releases don't even exist. Now, I really didn't know that izvorna dump channels remove label logos. After recently finding that out and noticing that the Glas Trebave album was also affected by that I, in good faith, decided to start a vote to remove it. Well turns out the Discogs moderators really didn't like that.
"Looks like the user's subs could use a bit of scrutiny, submitting photoshopped fantasy releases is a really bad sign."
Is the comment that would precede an entire team of Discogs moderators going through all of my 220+ submissions and deleting everything that they thought looked off.
"Are we all supposed to be familiar with how Balkan CDs look?"
Was posted under the CD version of Uzalud behari mirišu as a reason for removal.
After this campaign, me and many other contributors were very disappointed at the outstanding unprofessionalism and contemplating moving to a different site, this would just be fueled when I got banned out of nowhere weeks later.
After this event I was in search of another site, a site which was there for actual archiving.
That's how Savez.net was born.