Music
The Library of Congress is destroying CDs for science
by Tyler Munro
June 6, 2014
If you’re reading this, we’re willing to wager you consider yourself a music fan. Maybe you’re listening to music right now, and if so, we’re betting it’s probably not on CDs. Because let’s face it: While digital and vinyl sales are on the rise, compact discs are quickly going the way of the dinosaur.
And as we now know, that’s maybe for the better. According to the Library of Congress, CDs were never made to last, and while some last longer than others, they’re deteriorating at seemingly random rates. It’s not a matter of it, but when—eventually, your CDs are going to stop working.
“All of the modern formats weren’t really made to last a long period of time,” said the Library’s Chief of Preservation Research and Testing. “They were really more developed for mass production.”
To better predict that timeline, they’ve found a solution: Destruction. To better understand which kinds of CDs will fail and when, the Library wants to simulate conditions that can wreck discs, from extreme heat to oxidation. Of course there’s legitimate scientific cause for these experiments. In destroying CDs, they can better learn to preserve them, and at the study’s peak they were asking regular citizens to donate their unwanted albums.
Basically: Congress wants to destroy your shit so they can save it in the future. They’re not asking for CDs anymore, but the studies are ongoing. The results, it turns out, are startlingly inconsistent.
“We’re trying to predict, in terms of collections, which of the types of CDs are the discs most at risk,” France told The Atlantic. “The problem is, different manufacturers have different formulations so it’s quite complex in trying to figure out what exactly is happening because they’ve changed the formulation along the way and it’s proprietary information.”
It only gets more confusing from there.
They tested two copies of the exact same CD, produced by the same manufacturer, packaged the same way at the same time, and the results were strikingly different. Baked in extreme heat and humidity for roughly 500 hours, one copy of the CD was almost entirely unaffected. The other was rendered almost entirely transparent, stripped of its data and ultimately completely wrecked.
Guess which is which:
If you’ve still got your CD collections, the library says there are measures you can take to preserve them. Don’t write on them. As much as you love labelling your shitty mixtapes, markers and other doodles on the label create chemical reactions that will eventually wear right through the disc. Maybe you’re careful not to scratch the bottom of the CD when handling it, and that’s right, but scratches on the top have revealed to be almost as deadly to the data, if not more so.
Still, CDs aren’t the worst of the bunch. DVDs, they say, are even more susceptible to damage, if only because they hold exponentially more data.