THE DIGITAL DARK AGE

When we look into the past of humans, we mainly do it through physical items – paper, vellum, canvas, pottery, metal, fossils, bones and more recently, film and physical recorded media. We also have stories and songs, passed on verbally. But when our descendants look back, what will they use to understand life in the 21st century?

I sometimes worry that our increasing reliance on digital media will result in an almost complete absence of information. Paper is just paper, but digital formats come and go. When was the last time you used (or even saw) a 3½ inch floppy disc? 25 years ago they were the main way to move digital information around. CDs for data storage have come and gone, and no doubt the latest generation of USB sticks and external hard drives will eventually degrade, fail and become obsolete. Cloud storage? That’s good for general back ups – but the fees add up, and is your stored information really going to be kept for more than a decade or two? Companies get taken over and go out of business. Solar flares – and we’re always being told that a big one will come one day – can wreck devices because they can cause surges in current. Keeping on top of all these things seems like a lot of effort – and ultimately a bit futile.

Maybe I’m being pessimistic. Or maybe not. But if you wanted to, how could you safeguard your music for future generations to enjoy? An easy answer would be to make sure that you sell millions of copies of it, decreasing the chances of your music being lost or forgotten. But if that’s not likely, what else could you do?

For the short term, you can back up your music (stems and mixes, in a lossless format) in several places using different media and formats, so that the immediate threats of fire etc. are reduced. That’ll get you through the next 20 or 30 years if you’re lucky. If you have the opportunity, vinyl puts your music into the ‘physical items’ category – but vinyl is easily damaged, can be costly to produce – and requires a record player. You could also consider one of the many music archives out there. They each have their own specialities, so make sure you target the right ones. And consider their longer-term prospects – if it’s a charity for example, is its funding sustainable?

Or how about printing physical copies of your music? You could pay someone to transcribe it (i.e. write it out), although doing it yourself could be a good way to both preserve your creative output, and improve your musical skills. Most DAWs now have notation functions, so if you’re not hot on writing out music, you can quickly produce rough versions and go from there. There are two drawbacks though.

The first is the same as for any physical item – it can be lost, damaged, destroyed or thrown away. So you’d want to protect against that somehow – making sure copies are distributed widely and so on. If you have a few hundred pounds a year to spare, a safety deposit box might be an option…

The second drawback to transcribed music is that while the melody and harmony would be preserved, the recording wouldn’t. So forms of music that don’t translate well onto paper would lose their essence – and appeal, potentially making them more vulnerable to being thrown away.

All of these words seem to point to it basically being down to chance! But there might be one method of storing digital information which is better than the others: write-once Blu-ray M-Disc or HTL BD-R discs. They don’t write in the same way as CDs and regular DVDs, and some are apparently rated for at least 100-150 years, which definitely gets you past the short term risks. Just don’t solely rely on them, make lots of copies, spread them around - and hope that someone in the future has a device that can read them!

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