"Digital recordings are perishable in their own right —far less stable, in fact, than recordings on magnetic tape. A damaged analog tape is not necessarily a lost cause: An engineer may be able to perform restoration work and get the recording to play. But when a digital medium is compromised, it is most likely gone. Many masters from recent decades are kept on hard drives, notoriously fragile mechanisms that may not function after sitting for years in a vault. Today, labels increasingly rely on digital-tape formats like LTO. But LTO is backward compatible for just two generations. Labels must either continually retransfer their archives or maintain outdated playback equipment.
All these problems are exacerbated by the structure of the music business, in which hundreds of labels have been consolidated into three huge ones, which in turn have been absorbed by global conglomerates. The necessity of safeguarding a sound-recording heritage may appear abstract to executives at a distant parent company, who may simply see an expense on a balance sheet marked “Storage.” "—Jody Rosen

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html

#music #master_tapes #reel_to_reel #vault #masters_vault #fire #archives #tape_libraries #UMG #labels #catastrophe #loss #music_history #archival #audio #audio_master #masters #libraries #LTO

"UMG maintained additional tape libraries across the United States and around the world. But the label’s Vault Operations department was managed from the backlot, and the archive there housed some of UMG’s most prized material. There were recordings from dozens of record companies that had been absorbed by Universal over the years, including several of the most important labels of all time. The vault housed tape masters for Decca, the pop, jazz and classical powerhouse; it housed master tapes for the storied blues label Chess; it housed masters for Impulse, the groundbreaking jazz label. The vault held masters for the MCA, ABC, A&M, Geffen and Interscope labels. And it held masters for a host of smaller subsidiary labels. Nearly all of these masters — in some cases, the complete discographies of entire record labels — were wiped out in the fire."—Jody Rosen

The Day the Music Burned >

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html

#music #history #master_tapes #reel_to_reel #reels #vault #masters_vault #fire #archives #tape_libraries #UMG #Unviversal #labels #catastrophe #music_history #loss #archiving #audio #audio_master #masters #libraries