With one of the world’s most extensive collections of Latin American music recordings to its name, Codigo Music looked to storage and information management specialist Iron Mountain Incorporated to help catalogue, archive and digitise its extensive library.
Among Codigo’s assets is the catalogue of Latin music label Fania, which it acquired in 2008. Following the acquisition, Codigo recognised that the project presented two main challenges – multiple recording media formats and the threat of deterioration of that media due to age, environment and technology obsolescence. With time not on their side, Codigo and Iron Mountain began categorising and classifying recordings according to format and the condition within a safe storage environment, ready for storage in Iron Mountain’s secure locations.
‘The Fania catalogue is viewed as the Motown of Latin music,’ says Codigo Music Senior VP & General Manager, Bruce McIntosh. ‘This music is a big part of American culture – it’s a cultural institution for Hispanics in the US. When we started with the purchase, we found many different formats, some of which were not in the best condition, everything from quarter-inch masters to gold DVDs, to DAT. For that reason, we knew we had to make a move fairly quickly to be able to maintain and actually save some of these tapes from becoming mouldy and deteriorating. Luckily we’ve been able to restore a lot of these and bring them up to speed and up to newer technology. Iron Mountain was key in helping us set that process up so that we could have the categorization and the classification done on all the assets.
‘The great thing about Iron Mountain is we don’t have to actually take the asset out and ship it and turn it over to a DJ,’ McIntosh continues. ‘They have the studio onsite. We can pull the tapes out, have them transferred, have them digitised and sent to us on a link within a day to have those seeded out to different DJs and then they can transfer a format to us while maintaining the original asset there, safely kept. The value of working with Iron Mountain for us has been twofold – to maximise our revenues as a company and preserve the Latin cultural history here.’
Iron Mountain’s Entertainment Services serves clients in film, music, television, academia and entertainment, providing security and safety tailored to these market sectors. Iron Mountain currently stores nearly 27m individual media elements (films, music recording, videos) for 1,200 customers in eight dedicated facilities around the world, digitising one million assets and storing more than 50 petabytes of data.
‘The Latin American market sector is extremely important to Iron Mountain, and we are happy to provide our services for Codigo and an iconic label like Fania,’ says Jeff Anthony, SVP/Business Unit Leader at Iron Mountain Entertainment Services. ‘The music industry landscape is rapidly changing, and keeping our clients’ assets current presents unique challenges, but the preservation of historic, classic recordings is our number-one priority, and our role is to help in every way we can.’
More: www.ironmountain.com
