Music industry hard drives from the 1990s are dying, archivists warn

Hard drives used by the music industry in the 1990s are in danger of being unreadable, archivists have warned.

In a report by Mix published last month (August 19), shared by Wired yesterday (September 13), archiving specialists Iron Mountain Media and Archive Services shared their results from a survey of its vaults – which contain hard drives belonging to music industry clients, among others.

The survey revealed that “around one-fifth” of its inventory are unreadable. “That means there are historic sessions from the early to mid-’90s that are dying,” claims Iron Mountain Media’s Robert Koszela to Mix.

“In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know,” Koszela, who previously worked at record label Universal Music Group, continues. “It may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not; it’s a call for action.”

Prior to the 1990s, the majority of studio recordings and masters were stored on magnetic tape, which were handed to storage once used to press mass copies of albums on vinyl, CD, and cassette tape, among other formats. Magnetic tape requires optimum storage conditions to prolong its life – otherwise, deterioration of the tape is more than likely to happen, rendering it partially damaged or unplayable for future use.

Since the mid-1990s, music labels had begun to turn to hard drive storage to store either digitally-recorded music produced with digital audio workstations (DAWs), or digital tape transfers of past catalogues – with the belief that such storage is more resilient to aging than magnetic tape. Iron Mountain Media warns that it is not the case, and that they have found hard drives from that period suseptible to any number of issues.

“It’s so sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand-new case with the wrapper and the tags from wherever they bought it still in there,” Koszela says. “Next to it is a case with the safety drive in it. Everything’s in order. And both of them are bricks.”

The loss of studio masters has been an issue since 2019, when it was revealed that over 700 more artists were believed to have lost their masters in a 2008 warehouse fire at Universal Studios in Hollywood.

Among the list of artists included Beck, who shared with NME that an entire album’s worth of Hank Williams covers he recorded had perished in the fire, among other rare masters. “It was something I did maybe a year before I did ‘Sea Change’. That’s probably lost. Probably a lot of others,” he told NME. “I have tape cassettes of things like that around, but as far as masters they’re probably gone.”