Music industry hard drives are “dying”
According to specialist media archivists, a number of hard drives from the 1990s are becoming unreadable.
Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services, which assists with storing and digitising media, completed a survey of their vaults several years ago. They found that a number of hard drives were becoming unreadable, meaning the music contained on them would be lost.
Once the music was mixed, it was placed into different physical formats and stored. However, the conditions of storage weren’t always regulated to ensure that those hard drives would last. As a result, many of those recordings have degraded easily and are no longer usable.
The equipment used to play back certain hard drives has also become increasingly rare. Even if the correct player can be located, it’s likely that those files will have degraded over time.
When Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services surveyed their own vaults, they found that a fifth of their archives had already become unreadable. As a result, the company are looking to raise awareness about this issue.
“That means there are historic sessions from the early to mid-90s that are dying,” explained the company’s Global Director of Studio Growth and Strategic Initiatives, Robert Koszela, to Mix Online.
As these files degrade, we could be losing recordings of underground artists or entire movements. Some contemporary artists, such as shoegazer Panchiko, have found cult followings through the rediscovery of their physical recordings.
When Panciko’s D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L was discovered in the mid-2010s, a decade and a half after it was first recorded, it had already been subjected to deterioration. It was still readable enough to be remastered and reissued, but this is entirely down to luck. If the EP had not been rediscovered at this time, it may have deteriorated enough to have become unplayable.
Koszela went on to suggest that the “big challenge” is just “getting the word out there” about this issue. “In our lines of work,” he continued. “If we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know. It may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not; it’s a call for action.”
He shared his concerns that if we don’t take action against the degradation of hard drives left in archives, we will lose even more recordings. “My worry is that these assets will just be lost,” he concluded, “People need to know that their hard drives are dying.”
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