By the late 1920s, technological advancements made it possible to broadcast from recordings over the radio with acceptable levels of acoustic quality. In Weimar Republic Germany (1919–1933), this development spawned anxieties over the nature of radio, which had previously been conceived as a fundamentally live medium. Previous scholarship has examined how German radio discourse and practice engaged with the rise of recordings on radio with a focus on the technology involved and on debates over liveness and mediation. In this chapter, I turn instead to the important role that was played by the archive: concerns that radio stations might begin to build archives of recorded sound and music at the expense of live performance, but also the new artistic possibilities opened by such archives on which composers, sound designers, and other creators could draw. I show that liveness and mediation were major concerns in speculative debates, but that in practice, discourses of newness and topicality shaped the development and use of archives of recorded sound and music.