This is due to the magnetic media’s age and the increasing use of digital music. The music industry’s reliance on magnetic media for storing and distributing music in the 1990s was a significant factor in the rise of digital music. This reliance was driven by the affordability and accessibility of hard drives, which made it possible for artists and labels to distribute music to a wider audience.
This process, known as “mastering,” involved converting the analog audio signal from the recording studio into a digital format. The advent of digital audio workstations (DAWs) in the 1990s revolutionized the music industry. DAWs allowed musicians and producers to create, edit, and mix music digitally, eliminating the need for analog tape and mastering. This shift marked a significant change in the way music was produced and distributed.
Recommended “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.”