The music industry has sounded the alarm over “dying” technology that may result in recorded masters from the 1990s being lost.
Music Industry publication Mix reported this week that around 20 percent of disk archives from the 1990s were unreadable.
The publication quoted data recovery company Iron Mountain saying that it received thousands of industry archives each year to remaster, and a “huge percentage” were unrecoverable.
Iron Mountain Global Director of Studio Growth and Strategic Initiatives Robert Koszela said this meant “historic sessions from the early to mid-’90s that are dying”.
Before the year 2000, master tapes were just that – tapes. Tracks were transferred onto vinyl, cassette or CD and then the tapes were put into storage.
As technology changed and demand for new versions and remixes grew, it was found that some tapes were deteriorating, some were not playable and not all had been stored under optimum conditions.
There were also recordings made on equipment that was obsolete or in formats that could no longer be easily played.
As a result of this there was a move towards digitalisation of music and storing masters on hard drives.
While most people accepted that this would solve the problem, Iron Mountain has found that these disks may be no easier to recover than the old tapes.
“It’s so sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand-new case with the wrapper and the tags from wherever they bought it still in there,” Mr Koszela told Mix. “Next to it is a case with the safety drive in it. Everything’s in order. And both of them are bricks.”
The Mix article can be found on the publication website.
