Not Just Recordings
We’ve got a tremendous amount of costumes. We have things like gold records, guitars, things that people collect. When you talk about estates or individual artists, you talk about priceless memorabilia. We work with the Grammy Museum and Grammy Foundation, protecting and preserving costumes and historical treasures that come out of the Museum.
There are best practices in the industry and they come from Iron Mountain. We have curators and preservationists on staff, people who go to school and learn how to protect and preserve things. There are about 60 obsolete audio formats. You need to know how to handle each one. Some require different temperatures, different humidity. When you get into costumes you need HEPA filters and many air exchanges per hour.
The Future’s Artifacts
Some artists who have passed away, we’ve got their life collection––all of their costumes, gold records, original masters, things I wish I could talk about. This truly is about protecting cultural heritage. Not so much today, but hundreds of years from now, if these items are still being preserved properly, someone will look back and say a big thanks to the people who took care of them. This is no different than stone tablets or hieroglyphics or things that are thousands of years old.
Digital Complication
Before we went digital, for 70 or 80 years the entertainment preservation business was much more constant. It had more continuity. You were preserving physical assets. Digital assets are finicky. It’s a great distribution medium, but from an archiving standpoint the jury is still out. We know hard drives are a lousy archive medium. We’re learning things about how when you migrate from LTO2 to LTO3 to LTO4, you have data degradation. You have algorithms that if you don’t keep up with become obsolete, so it’s not just the gear you have to keep up with––it’s the software. It’s become very complex since the introduction of digital.
"Over time, those hard drives seize up and you lose all your data. As old-school as tape sounds, we’ve got tapes dating back 60 - 70 years in pristine condition."
Discretion and Security
Few people know what Iron Mountain does on the entertainment side. That’s frustrating, but it’s also by design. The last thing a label or an estate wants to see in the trades is that their priceless articles are stored at Iron Mountain. So secrecy is important to us. I wish I had a dollar for every person who’s been through our facilities and said, “I didn’t know you guys did this.” Unless you are absolutely connected to the entertainment industry and deal with the Grammys or the labels, most people don’t know what we do.
We’ve got a facility in Boyers, Pennsylvania that’s been on the History Channel. It’s 12 square miles in size, so it’s three by four miles square. It’s a DoD [Department of Defense] facility. It’s underground, roughly 300 feet. And that’s where we store the crown jewels for labels. They’re in zero earthquake country. No risk of flood, no risk of fire. It’s the safest place in the world.
A Surplus of Engineers
Because we are plugged into the industry, it’s easy for us to find talent, especially if you’re talking about L.A. or New York where we operate two of our three digital studios. The record business is going through a difficult time and there’s contraction when it comes to employment with these mastering labs and labels, studios, etcetera. At least right now, there happens to be a lot of availability when it comes to seasoned engineers out on the street.
Legacy
This is something we take seriously. It’s about protecting our cultural heritage, our legacy. We’re not just a storage company. We consider ourselves preservationists and engineers. And I want people to know that these one-of-a-kind assets will be around for hundreds and hundreds of years because of Iron Mountain.
I don’t think people realize when they listen to a song the reason they’re able to listen to it, especially a song that’s 30, 40, 50 years old, is because Iron Mountain has preserved that song so well that the label was able to take it out of a vault, have it digitized and sell it at a Starbucks. We take for granted that a song sounds really good. But it sounds really good because someone on the front end, someone like Iron Mountain, took their job seriously and made sure that music was preserved properly so people could listen to it for decades to come.
Years with Company: 21
Web: ironmountain.com
Clients: Over 1,200 entertainment clients
