Next spring, a Norwegian company plans to start the creation of what they say is a doomsday vault specifically made to preserve the world’s most important music recording.
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Through the use of future-proof digital storage developed by Piql, the Global Music Vault will endure for at least 1,000 years. Buried almost 1,000 feet below a snow-covered mountain, on the Svalbard archipelago, an arctic island between Norway and the North Pole.
Using binary coding and high-density QR codes written onto special durable optical film for posterity. While the cold and dry conditions of the Svalbard add to the shelf life of the stored data, Piql claim the vault will be able to withstand obstacles such as electromagnetic pulses from a nuclear explosion that would normally deal permanent damage to electronic equipment and corrupt digital files. Sharing the same safeguards as the Arctic World Archive and the Global Seed Vault, which are also located underground on the archipelago.
Joining forces with the Paris-based International Council with taking on the ambitious task of determining which recording to preserve is Oslo-based Elire Management Group. Commenting to Billboard, Luke Jenkinson, managing director of the Global Music Vault and managing partner at Elire said, “We don’t want to just protect a certain genre and certain era.” In fact, as Luke added,“We want to preserve the music that has shaped us as human beings and shaped our nations.”
The plan is for a global committee to work with various business groups to help select the “most precious and loved” music from all over the world. Allowing national submissions to be voted on by the public, “we want the nations and regions of the world to curate what music gets deposited,” said Jenkinson.
Besides their goal of being open to all kinds of music from all around the world, they also hope to have the vault completed by early 2022. Revealing that the first “deposit” will focus on the preservation of Indigenous music, with pop efforts to follow.
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