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Last year, the Beggars Banquet label unearthed the multitrack master recordings of the Cult's classic 1985 album, Love, for a planned deluxe edition. The
LP was an early digital recording, and to the label's shock, one master was unplayable; the other contained only 80 percent of the album. "That's the problem
with digital," says Steve Webbon, head archivist of the Beggars Group. "When it goes, it's just blank. It's gone."
Welcome to the digital nightmare. Until the 1980s, music was recorded on analog tapes that were stored in vaults and easily played back. In the digital
era, that process has changed irrevocably. A new report issued by the Library of Congress calls digital formats "not inherently safe harbors of preservation,"
and raised red flags about how music collections are being stored. "There's a paradox," says Sam Brylawski, a former Library of Congress archivist. "We
can record so easily now with digital recorders. But at the same time, the stuff is at greater risk than it used to be." Producer T Bone Burnett, who testified
at a hearing on the topic, couldn't agree more: "Digital is a feeble storage medium."
Read more:
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/file-not-found-the-record-industrys-digital-storage-crisis-20101207#ixzz1kfP0GGxE