The Day You Lost Your Music Legacy

"The Day the Music (Master Tapes) Died." Fortunately, digital sampling has finally become sensitive enough to record down to the tape hiss and the film grain. There is hope, just as scanning has saved and shared so many rare and fragile books. I prefer to read archival book scans than a new print.

BobC

Hope at least after this horrible drama industries take a look at DNA storage! The album Mezzanine by Massive Attack has been stored using genetic information.

Universally Lost.

MrMobodies

They had a fire at the Library of Congress Annex years ago. The History Guy had a vid on it. Many original movies were lost. Some folks don't learn from the past.

It's a shame they hadn't had some of that stuff stored at the Library Of Congress, I would think a lot of it was deserving. A lot of my work is restoring recordings from South Africa, Nigeria etc, where the master tapes went up in smoke long ago, or vanished. In the case of Universal though thankfully they have made a huge archive of digital copies (hi res 192kHz 24bit) of most of the tapes, if that's any consolation. That being said, I've wondered what will be left from our civilisation in 2000 or 3000 years when they're digging us up? How much of our data? The vinyl might be some of the best finds.

Dan Elleson

How could all that have been saved in one place? Never released, too... lost.

Inventor Pardue

Sorry to hear about your reel-to-reel. 78 RPM turntables can be had, but they're mostly vintage.

Brendan Meteer

Ye Gods.

Brendan Meteer

Long time watcher, first time commenter. Love this video. Very thoughtful. Have also just joined your Patreon! Great work lately (and actually all time).

It's not only the media itself, It is the equipment to play it. Where do you get a turntable that has 78rpm? My Sony reel-to-reel died about 10 years ago. Who can fix it?

This has been on my mind for a while now. With the loss of original material be it books, videos, software or music what will that mean for our culture? For 1000's of years we have relied on writing things down on physical medium to pass on knowledge but this century we have started to virtualise knowledge. So what happens when the physical mediums are abandoned completely? How will we ensure the history of the present can make it to the future? Just take one example. You can know what your grandparents and great grandparents and even great great grandparents looked like because photos can and do last a hundred years. But when was the last time you took a real photo? If you started taking digital pictures back in 2000 was 640x480 a good enough resolution for you ? How was it stored? On a Compact flash card? A memory Stick can you even read them now. ? You have 1000's or pictures of your family , your kids your life, but how can you keep them safe for your grandchildren or their children ? That is just 20 years. imagine the gulf in accessibility in the next 80 ? Something has to change or despite our arrogance human evolution might just be a inkblot on the history of the world with nothing to show for it.

veritanuda

This news has been rippling through my group of friends over the weekend and we are all saddened and dumbfounded by how such important masters could go up in smoke. The realization is that people are buying re-issued vinyl thinking they are getting the "real-deal" when a lot of the times its ripped off a digital format like CD far removed from the original master tapes, even music geeks are unsure of what goes into storing masters and where they physically are. We just don't think of this stuff, I almost had this romantic idea that precious recording are keep in bomb proof fort knox style vaults or even kept in a safe at home by the artists or producers. Of course this is fantasy, the masters are held by big bastard corporations that lets face it aren't in the business of being nice or doing the right thing.

Oh wow, that's such sad news. Nirvana and Soundgarden are two of my favourite bands, both of which have released remastered editions of albums, although notably not all their albums. And there was some criticism of these, so they may not have been taken from the original masters. Anyway, I guess the best you could hope for is someone thought to make copies of some of these masters. Obviously that may not have been the case for everything that went up in the fire, but you never know what might find its way out of the woodwork.

UpLateGeek

Oohh NO!! It breaks my heart. The physical media reflects people. The original touch by hand, mind and spirit. We must take care of our legacy.

Terrible. Seems music archiving is in the same place silent film preservation was in the sixties--nearly non-existant.

I was ignorant of that incident... such a loss. Also, I watched the video to the very end and now can't get Don McLean's lyrics out of my head. :-) Somewhere, I have a vinyl single of that song... I recall it had to be separated into 2 parts each on a different side.

Howard Simons

WTF!

EEVblog

I wonder if this sad and shocking loss would have come to my attention if not shared here. I truly appreciate you sharing this. Incredibly sad but I would rather have known. Thank you Fran.

I heard about this a long time ago. It was extremely saddening to me then. The new sad part is that we are only learning about the scope of the loss just recently, on top of the loss itself. I think of it like the burning of the library of Alexandria. Music itself is a fleeting experience. We try to capture it but we can never really ever hold it forever. Countless classical manuscripts have been lost or burnt or destroyed. It happens. It's cold comfort, though. Maybe the library of congress needs to keep digital copies of all masters? I don't know the answer, but maybe it just puts more importance into people actually buying physical copies of the music they like.

That's beyond sad. Walked around the corner to Slugs the hear Sun Ra and John Coltrane play. Guess I have to keep that memory secure.

It is sad that the originals are gone, but the music is not lost; there are millions of copies of much of the music. The original manuscripts of composers like Beethoven are long gone, but we still play the music. The music has not died.

Damn! That hurts! Didn't you play in The Mysterions?

William Alsing