In 1994 I read an article in the British music journal the Wire that claimed that compact discs have a life expectancy of ten years. I have seen references to an article in Scientific American making the same claim and heard that this has been confirmed many times by other studies. The only thing is, uh, I’ve had a few CDs for more than ten years, and they play fine. So what exactly is the deal? Does the speed of degradation have to do with how often the CD is played? I mean, most of the time, my CDs are sitting in their cases on my shelf. Please tell me whether I should be getting my Sonny Rollins fix from some other recording technology (like, say, vinyl).
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I got a lot of letters along these lines in the late 1980s and didn’t dismiss the idea of “CD rot” out of hand. But I suspected that predictions of imminent CD meltdown were exaggerated–and time has shown they were. Physical survival of recordings is only part of the story, though. The real threat is loss of the technology needed to play them back. Most people think they’ll be able to enjoy their CDs for a lifetime, and maybe they will. But good luck playing your eight-track tapes.
Author Jeff Rothenberg of the Rand Corporation included a photograph showing a replica of the Rosetta stone along with various digital media from the past 50 years, including punch cards, punched paper tape, 5.25-inch and 8-inch floppy disks (remember 8-inch floppy disks, gramps?), and a large multiplatter disk from an old mainframe. The Rosetta stone is still readable after 2,200 years, but the digital media are not–not because the media have deteriorated, but because the machines needed to play them back have disappeared, for all practical purposes.
Let’s take a storage medium considered cutting edge 50 years ago–magnetic tape. It’s now recognized that tape degrades after 20 years, maybe sooner, unless you’re extremely careful. Some tapes used for the 1960 U.S. census became unreadable and the data was almost lost. (Luckily they had a backup on microfilm, which supposedly will last 500 years, although even microfilm has doubters.) For all our modern advances, by far the most durable storage technology ever devised remains the written word, as recorded in stone, papyrus, and clay.
