Originally published at: Master recordings of 90s music on slowly dying media - Boing Boing
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Tape is more robust and lasts a lot longer than most people think. It can also store bits - just like an SSD or hard drive - as well as analogue recordings.
Seems to me there are separate problems here.
- Musicians and their engineers and studio bods, etc. need to take care that the full and final recording is captured and/or ensure that all the separate input tracks from the process are, too.
- Someone needs to decide what medium to use to capture it for storage/archiving
- Archives need to be checked - and refreshed - on a planned cycle. Get the archive tape/SSD out and re-record it onto newer media, before it starts to deteriorate. Possibly easier with bits than analogue recordings (does re-recording tape lead to lossiness? I’m sure there must be fixes for that by now?)
It’s not really a music-only problem - bit-rot is a more widespread challenge, generally - but some museum-standard curation expertise and professionalism may be needed, rather than musicians and engineers assuming it’s been handled (when most of them have no idea about bit-rot, for example). This is one area I’d expect record companies to invest in - but no doubt they are too short-sighted to actually invest - I mean, it might reduce next quarter’s bonus! If they did, it would represent some real long-term added value to offer their signed recording artists.
I wonder if there is a market for an independent curation service. You’d think organisations like Hipgnosis Song Fund and all those other investors in classic catalogues would have a strong interest in protecting their investment this way. I wonder what their approach is.
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With the rise of digital storage on decidedly non-permanent media, I’ve always wondered if all ens finding is in the distant future witll have a @anon61221983 historian equivalent who will surmise that we peaked in the Renaissance era simply because the structures and archives from that time are still preserved and available, while it seems that after this period, everything disintegrated on unreadable media, or development devolved to rusted metal structures or a fine film of microplastics covering everything.
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That actually will require the public to give a shit and to want to fund historic preservation. But pretty much ANYTHING in the humanities is way on down the list of things most of the public actually care about… because they’ve been told that what really matters is what makes money, so fields like history and historical preservation (especially of culture, which most people see as a commodity anyway) are simply a luxury to be handed over to the wealthy to deal with in their spare time…
We have both the National Archives and the Library of Congress that do some of that work already. LoC has a pretty extensive collection of sound recordings across time periods. And anyone who makes an album can send a physical copy to the LoC to ensure their copyrights are protected (with the proper paperwork along with it) and they will hold a physical copy of the media in their collection.
But the ideology of “gubmit bad/ corporations gud” is not just a right wing problem. People across the political spectrum think that private entities can do a better job than publicly funded organizations like the LoC or Nat. archives, or that official archives are somehow inferior because of the influence of the state. And it’s true that official state archives can be problematic, in that they’ll preserve certain things over others, but that’s precisely why we need these things to be under the control of experts who have a broad base of experience and that they have broad public support and greater public inclusion in shaping institutions like these. Historians and archivists have often failed to make it clear why these things matter, not just in terms of pushing a particular narrative about the state, but in terms of making the public aware just how important it is to preserve things so that we can better understand the past from the broadest possible perspectives. Private archives often only just serve the needs of particular constituencies, while a well-run state archive can represent a broader base of voices and preserve a broader swath of history when done right and when the public makes demands on these institutions.
All they care about is amassing wealth. From their website:
Hipgnosis owns and manages over $3 billion worth of the most successful and culturally important songs of all time. Our portfolio consists of over 40,000 songs from more than 150 catalogues. We create value by optimising revenue generation, driving consumption and advocating on behalf of songwriters.
I don’t see anything about historical preservation and public education in that mission statement, so… it’s not as important a goal as “revenue generation”… state institutions are ultimately unanswerable to us, unlike something like hipgnosis. But also the public has to give a shit about historical preservation in the first place.
That absolutely could be the case, which is why we should give more funding to public institutions to expand their preservation efforts already underway. That’s on us if we don’t.
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Also, this reminds me about how so many of the first two doctors episodes of Doctor who disappeared. The BBC had a policy of wiping recordings up until the 70s, so lots of episodes of the Hartnell and Troughton are just gone.
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If the same money being burned developing self-driving vehicles, “AI,” etc. was put into this,
…we’d probably have these on store shelves yesterday for a buck apiece.
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I think generally, though. preservation isn’t going to be a case of there being some ultimate final form that will preserve materials for all time into infinity… As long as we live in a capitalist system that demands constant “innovation” (whether we need it or not), then new formats (whether it be in computing or analogue sound recording) are going to replace it, and then they’ll stop making compatible readers or older media (like how most lappys no longer have DVD drives, etc). I don’t know if there is an answer to media going out of usage, but as long as it’s the case, that means investing in legacy media in public institutions so older media can be played (including computers), and transferring information onto the latest format as well. The format something is in matters, but preserving the information matters to. We should do both, me thinks.
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Yeah, sure, for ‘public goods’, I completely agree. But even though …
I was really talking about the many commercial organisations whose long-term business model may not be as viable as they think, given this problem. If your ONLY business operation (and source of revenue) depends ultimately on those recordings actually existing, it would be wise to secure them for the long term. But while long-termism may be in the interests of the actual shareholder (to be debated with all the quick-buck-this-quarter traders on the stock markets) it somehow remains not in the interests of those at the top of those firms, actually running them.
They don’t need to have a
…motive in order to have a reason to pay attention to this issue. It’s their core fucking business.
So…
…should be a focus.
But short-term late-stage senior executives have more personal interests, mostly, it seems. I guess they just assume someone will find the music, all they need to do is licence it and then whoever just paid them can legitimately copy it from someone else who already paid them.
But without a format, how can sounds be preserved? (Yeah, sheet music. Not really a sound preserving media, though.)
Well, no… that’s making money. If it’s no longer profitable to preserve the media that they own, they’ll sell it off and do something else.
Public preservation is the way to go. If private for or non-profit want to get involved, that’s great, too, but if you expect this stuff to be around, we can’t depend on them. It’s true that states can also go away, but they tend to have a longer shelf life than corporations/non-profits, and then you can also partner with international organizations (UNESCO) as an added back up.
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I’ve been in an extreme archive where thousands or more “master recordings” of audio and video files are stored. They last a really long time in the right conditions, and all said, it’s not that expensive, considering the potential loss. I remember being able to hear a 50+ year old audio track, with all its components seperated and remixed, and it sounded as good as if it was playing live.
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And yet, often times those are not taken into consideration by for-profit corporations that have extensive archives.
Profit motive will not preserve our history. It needs better and more robust protections than the whims of industry. It needs the public to understand what can and will be lost if we don’t do this in a systemic manner. We need better historical education, starting with k-12, including HOW histories are actually written and what they depend on to get written.
Until that happens, we’ll continue to lose our musical history and the future that @orenwolf predicted in his comment WILL come to pass. We have a choice about that, and honestly, this should be yet another election issue. I suspect that a Trump presidency/dictatorship will see a vast gutting of our public institutions that preserve our history, with lots of it put into private hands, and politically motivated historical preservation that leaves out lots of our voices.
But getting people to understand that and to give a shit is like pulling teeth. It’s really depressing, as someone who teaches history…
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Even large shareholders, the ones who vote at shareholder meetings, pretty consistently favor short term gains over the long term health of the companies they invest in. It’s one of the weaknesses, in my opinion, of capitalism.
A company that’s in the business of making money off music is always going to lose interest in music as it ages, because the majority of music listeners, especially those willing to pay money to listen to it, will be favoring newer, popular music. Bruce Springsteen’s catalog may still be quite valuable today, but do you really think it’s going to remain as valuable for another 10 years? How about 20? And once it enters the public domain, the monetary value of those recordings will really plummet.
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Yes, that’s always been the case, and it’s gotten only worse since the 1970s and the rise of neoliberalism too… the expansion of both venture capital firms and of private equity have not helped in that regard.
And this is the whole problem with treating music (or any culture) as a commodity. The value in Springsteen catalog doesn’t just rest on it’s value vis-a-vis the market for pop music. It tells us something about a point in time, about the people who lived through that time, and what people found valuable to talk about through culture. What is popular on the charts matters, too, but not nearly as much as the discussion being had in the music and by the fans.
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I’ve always enjoyed this:
Kind of an all-consuming effort to invent ways to reliably communicate with the future instead of relying upon them to interpret our lives properly by digging up our bones.
Again, I don’t necessarily object to organizations like that, but there needs to be efforts that are far more public and democratic. At the end of the day, these sorts of projects being led by people who feel that they are in a position to know what matters over the long term, more than the rest of us…
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Master the recording for vinyl - it doesn’t actually have to be released as such ‐ then save & secure the stamping plates. (Tho for that matter, the vinyl copy would last a good while, too.)
I guess photographic images face the same issue, and now I recall my photography teacher saying that slides were longer-lasting than prints. Now all we need is someone to manufacture slide film again…
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From one of my fave sci-fi novel series, “Burn it to glass.” As long as we still have data readers for it in the nigh-incomprehensible future (or a few decades from now.)
eta: and media needs storage in several formats and different locations. There are many cases where the last copy of something either died the true death or became unreadable because no one had a reader for that storage method.
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I am absolutely gonna send all my mixes and stems to the Library of Congress, thanks!
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It’s a fascinating subject. The problem is that recordings of any type are like teeth: ignore them and they’ll go away. All manufactured media have a use-by date. The process of maintaining an archive is that of copying the data to whatever thing is currently good at storing ones and zeroes, every couple of years, for as long as you wish the archive to remain available. This sometimes requires reformatting the data.
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You probably want to start here:
Exactly!
Also true…
I do think it’s worth taking the time and preserve older media formats in archives, though. Holding onto old cylinder phonographs, for example, has allowed for the LoC to preserve records that might have otherwise been lost. Although in some cases, they often had to use computers to figure out ways to lift the sound, because playing back some of the old wax or tin cylinder phonographs would have just destroyed them. Still, being able to play the original formats can provide valuable historical details that a digital format might miss. It does depend on what you’re looking to understand of course…
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