My father told me he wanted to make USB flash drives of all the scanned and digitized family photos and other assorted letters and mementos. He planned to distribute them to all family members hoping that at least one set would survive. When I explained that they ought to be recipes to new media every N number of years or risk deteriorating or becoming unreadable (like a floppy disk when you have no floppy drive), he was genuinely shocked. He lost interest in the project that he’d thought was so bullet proof.
This is where “piracy” is actually the industry’s saving grace. Decades or centuries later, will record labels exist and be well-managed (and flush with cash) enough to preserve archival copies of their artists catalogs? Probably not.
Will obscure weirdos exist all around the world on Usenet, IRC, or seeding torrents? Possibly.
What is really being discussed here is archiving of master recordings and session files. The publically avaliable releases themselves aren’t really in jeopardy. Orthough piracy probably does provide an extra layer of security to more obscure releases.
I thought I read somewhere that when they were making one of the Toy Story movies, there was some catastrophic data loss that nearly tanked the whole production. But then one of the animators came back from maternity and said wait, I think I have most of it synced to my home server? And the next thing you know, John Lasseter himself is barrelling down the highway to her place and it turned out yeah, she did have it.
The value of distributed redundancy
Something to be said for the wfh movement too.
Oh, fuck. Prince’s Vault… God I hope the estate has a plan to preserve all of that…
Many films and tv programs survive only thanks to a total stranger keeping their own copy. For a long term survival of any media it has to be copied and distributed far and wide.