I hate to sound dismissive of what is clearly an important problem - one that I have not been directly responsible for. But I think there are business reasons why music archives are not appropriately backed up. Even I am familiar with the fact that tape catalogs have been destroyed by fires here in Los Angeles.
I hate to sound dismissive of what is clearly an important problem - one that I have not been directly responsible for. But I think there are business reasons why music archives are not appropriately backed up. Even I am familiar with the fact that tape catalogs have been destroyed by fires here in Los Angeles.
As a data engineer, like most people with decades of experience in the IT industry, I have worked through many struggles over the years in maintaining backups of my own data and that of my customers. Let us assume, however, that the music industry came up with a reasonable high fidelity standard for DAC from end-to-end. Once that was accomplished there are cloud storage and data management standards that are available to business that are not only significantly permanent, but can be contractually guaranteed. The contracts can also be made to include take out rights - which means the service provider must give you back your originals on demand in a fee-for-service model.
You can certainly imagine what the NSA spends keeping digital records of what they have recorded from SIGINT bugs in Putin's offices. Surely we can handle a couple million digital masters in a tiny fraction of AWS' data center footprint. I find it hard to believe that Qobuz or Tidal (with no respect to their encoding standard) would say such a thing is impossible.
On the other hand I am in absolute agreement when it comes to the breadth and depth of what today's streaming services provide to their subscribing customers. That business sucks and I'm going to continue to keep all of my physical CDs. But I am digital first and I insure that my terabytes are backed up redundantly. In fact, my problem is more one of deduplication than loss.
I have no disrespect for analog recording primarily because it is a mature technology. I distinguish between digital for digital's sake and bringing forward the advantages that a well-managed digital environment can consistently deliver. People who don't do data management well are just being cheap - I suppose analogously like kids who used to use TDK D-120s instead of TDK SA-90s, some of which I still have. But if the cheap business models erode the capacity for good recording equipment to be manufactured that's the big problem. But today, the music industry (given a tip-top digital standard) could take advantage of what IT has learned in data management, redundant storage, disaster recovery and service level agreements.
I agree with everything, my position is more of a, “yes and…”
1. Yes, Putin and…us too! SIGINT watches everyone (thanks Snowden), not merely High Profile People. Assume no security except that which you negotiate, and then cross your fingers.
Which leads to the main point: everything exists on a priority spectrum. That usually has to be learned…usually by losing stuff. I’ve lost plenty of analog and digital music along the way, and have tapes that I’m ready to dub over because the value of tape is more than the crap audio. (I recently picked up a Tascam 4-track at a pawn shop and it was an unbelievable trip through time—highly recommended!)
The cloud stuff is a very important component and, fwiw, AWS is pretty cheap (free to setup and start practicing on, FWIW). A NAS is a no-brainer, USB drives, etc. it’s definitely easier to backup than it’s ever been, though I hate to think what I’d need to do to resurrect my old SCSI drives or ADATs. That stuff is dead to me because it’s already either somewhere else or not worth recovering.
I would still purport that there is an attrition rate for historical documents and relics and that digital may extend the lifecycle by some percent, but ultimately contracts end, instances fail and never get rebooted, businesses and technology change. The onus for preservation will always be with us and some thought needs to be put into choosing what one saves.
Personally, I’ve always enjoyed the impermanent aspect of art; it keeps it dangerous. But professional and artistic standards are not the same. I presume that at this point data warehousing is a service a studio might provide. But I can also imagine handing two hard disks to an artist and saying, “Thanks for the business, good luck. Next!”
I hate to sound dismissive of what is clearly an important problem - one that I have not been directly responsible for. But I think there are business reasons why music archives are not appropriately backed up. Even I am familiar with the fact that tape catalogs have been destroyed by fires here in Los Angeles.
As a data engineer, like most people with decades of experience in the IT industry, I have worked through many struggles over the years in maintaining backups of my own data and that of my customers. Let us assume, however, that the music industry came up with a reasonable high fidelity standard for DAC from end-to-end. Once that was accomplished there are cloud storage and data management standards that are available to business that are not only significantly permanent, but can be contractually guaranteed. The contracts can also be made to include take out rights - which means the service provider must give you back your originals on demand in a fee-for-service model.
You can certainly imagine what the NSA spends keeping digital records of what they have recorded from SIGINT bugs in Putin's offices. Surely we can handle a couple million digital masters in a tiny fraction of AWS' data center footprint. I find it hard to believe that Qobuz or Tidal (with no respect to their encoding standard) would say such a thing is impossible.
On the other hand I am in absolute agreement when it comes to the breadth and depth of what today's streaming services provide to their subscribing customers. That business sucks and I'm going to continue to keep all of my physical CDs. But I am digital first and I insure that my terabytes are backed up redundantly. In fact, my problem is more one of deduplication than loss.
I have no disrespect for analog recording primarily because it is a mature technology. I distinguish between digital for digital's sake and bringing forward the advantages that a well-managed digital environment can consistently deliver. People who don't do data management well are just being cheap - I suppose analogously like kids who used to use TDK D-120s instead of TDK SA-90s, some of which I still have. But if the cheap business models erode the capacity for good recording equipment to be manufactured that's the big problem. But today, the music industry (given a tip-top digital standard) could take advantage of what IT has learned in data management, redundant storage, disaster recovery and service level agreements.
I agree with everything, my position is more of a, “yes and…”
1. Yes, Putin and…us too! SIGINT watches everyone (thanks Snowden), not merely High Profile People. Assume no security except that which you negotiate, and then cross your fingers.
Which leads to the main point: everything exists on a priority spectrum. That usually has to be learned…usually by losing stuff. I’ve lost plenty of analog and digital music along the way, and have tapes that I’m ready to dub over because the value of tape is more than the crap audio. (I recently picked up a Tascam 4-track at a pawn shop and it was an unbelievable trip through time—highly recommended!)
The cloud stuff is a very important component and, fwiw, AWS is pretty cheap (free to setup and start practicing on, FWIW). A NAS is a no-brainer, USB drives, etc. it’s definitely easier to backup than it’s ever been, though I hate to think what I’d need to do to resurrect my old SCSI drives or ADATs. That stuff is dead to me because it’s already either somewhere else or not worth recovering.
I would still purport that there is an attrition rate for historical documents and relics and that digital may extend the lifecycle by some percent, but ultimately contracts end, instances fail and never get rebooted, businesses and technology change. The onus for preservation will always be with us and some thought needs to be put into choosing what one saves.
Personally, I’ve always enjoyed the impermanent aspect of art; it keeps it dangerous. But professional and artistic standards are not the same. I presume that at this point data warehousing is a service a studio might provide. But I can also imagine handing two hard disks to an artist and saying, “Thanks for the business, good luck. Next!”
Amen and thanks.
Here's my strategy. But also I'm invested in co-ops. It makes sense to network home labs with people you trust. https://mdcbowen.substack.com/p/seven-rules-for-saving-all-your-stuff