Most young artists and producers, and many veteran ones, don't give enough consideration to archiving their music. (Archiving means to securely store important information for a long period of time.) It is wise to archive your stereo masters in both mastered and unmastered form, if not your complete sessions and tracks. Now it turns out that people who think they have their music safely stored are discovering it is gone.
Since their inception, countless artists, producers and labels who endeavor to keep their music properly archived have used the CD-R and DVD-R for storage. This is a seemingly obvious choice because it is not mechanical like a hard drive so it can't fail if properly stored. For the past 20 or so years since CD plants have accepted audio CD-Rs as masters, many mastering rooms have offered an archival service, storing Production Master CD's on a yearly contract.
Mastering rooms are now beginning to report that CD-R's they are pulling from storage vaults where they have sat since they were created are no longer readable. Not only had these discs never been exposed to light, they'd been stored in perfect temperature and humidity. In some cases these have been masters from major labels. It appears that somewhere in the range of 10 to 11 plus years is when the dye in the data layer or recordable discs begins deteriorating, even if the disc has never been exposed to sunlight. As of yet there is no report of anyone being able to recover a deteriorated disc in any way. You may have older discs yourself that work fine, but my thought is it's not worth it to trust them any longer.
The answer to this is "migration", which in the world of archiving means to transfer all of your data from one medium to another on a regular basis. What is now recommended is to migrate your music archive every five years to new discs, drives or whatever future media becomes available. You should store your material on both hard (or solid state) drives as well as a hard medium like CD-R or DVD-R. DO NOT DEPEND ON A HARD DRIVE ALONE!
This will also keep you on top of technology, as you can be sure that the ability to read CD-R, DVD-R, firewire, USB or whatever will be obsoleted as soon as the manufacturers can sneak it in on us.
I would also recommend our blog post Don't Forget the Future for information on what you should get from your mastering room for proper archiving.
Since I've already received comments on this, let me explain - this does not mean your CD collection will become unplayable. A CD-R is not a CD. The data layer of a CD is a metal layer that has physical pits, called 'picts', that the playback laser reflects off of. The only thing that would prevent the laser from seeing the picts is if the surface of the CD is scratched. The data layer of a CD-R is a photo-sensitive dye on which the CD burner creates a a series of black dots, if you will, that simulate the physical picts on a CD. It is this dye that is deteriorating where the 'dots' are no longer visible to the player. The same is true of DVD vs. DVD-R.
One more side note - this is another reason why, when you go to manufacturing, you need to verify that you are getting a replication of CD's, not a duplication onto CD-R's. Unless you're not interested in your music being playable after 10 years or so.
