Bad news for music lovers: Fantasy Studios, building closed. Get your OJC CD's now!!

The number one requirement of all archives and libraries is that the books or files they contain are individually labeled and can always be positively identified. There needs to be a comprehensive system that tells you *roughly* what a given "item" contains and if an archive fails to do that generally or in part, it is disorganized.
Example: You have 30 different editions of a book that came out over the years. All are different. You want the first edition. The library has to have a system that tells you specifically: "This is the first edition". The library accomplishes that by giving each book an individual signature. Theoretically a tape archive should have the same systematic structure that tells you: "This is the master tape" and should not rely on the great services of an individual (which are still needed for many other things).
The problem with these tape-archives is probably that they do not have trained librarians or archivists and therefore not a systematic structure to the whole thing. This is hardly their fault, but it should be noted at least.

 

Words fail me.
Archiving needs to be in a systematic way and full records of what is taken kept.

 

My understanding is things have been much *better* since CBS/Sony moved there, not the other way around.

What on earth makes you think anything is going to be destroyed?

As far as Fantasy goes, how many tapes exist for any one album?

 

But, if we can believe what Steve says about how difficult it is to get the correct tapes out of Iron Mountain, it can indeed be a bad deal. Concord owns a lot more music than CCR, Stax, and jazz titles.

That depends on the company in question. Nowadays, record companied do not destroy tapes. They are way too valuable to them now. That's why people move things to IM, to preserve them safely.

Entierly possible. Unless Concord hires their own archivist to work there, they will hire someone off the street who has little knowledge and do what Steve says, mark everything "master" and just give you whatever comes up in the computer. From what i've read, it's next to impossible for anyone other than an employee to go in there to get the job done.

 

Theoretically a nice idea, but when you get as Steve indicates 60 boxes of tapes all labeled Master Tape for 1 song this is a definite issue/problem. Without Stuart or someone else who for certain knows it's next to impossible due to costs. This is just bad on so many levels.

 

Wow! Earlier in this thread, Iron Mountain gets a beating! Iron Mountain can only be as good as the information they are given. The company I work for stores Cds there (over 6,000 so far), and I have never had a problem retrieving something, because we made sure everything was numbered with a description before it was given to them. When master tapes are given to Iron Mountain, the same thing should be done. If something isn't marked well, I wouldn't blame Iron Mountain, I would blame the studio and/or record company that didn't label them with a good enough description.

Frank R.

 

It is much safer for the tapes to be in Iron Mountain than at the Fantasy Studios. This has been in the works for a long time

 

I dont blame Iron Mountain either. They are what they are. Its Concord. They just sent everybody home and dumped the tapes in a warehouse to save a buck. That was the attitude.

 

Thanks for the explanation, Steve. Depressing really. I guess there is little hope that the data will be entered correctly, if the important people who have the knowledge have already been laid off. Hopefully I am wrong.

(Still, this stuff should have been marked from the very beginning. I am aware that the reality is obviously different)

 

Would be nice to hear from Concord on this issue. I can't imagine how this could have a good outcome, given that no-one will be around to properly label the tapes prior to storage, but what's their story? Has anyone emailed them?

 

They are messin' with our Fantasy 45 series?? Grrrrr. This is more than grievous this is plain senseless and painful. Man, Steve, I hope you can find what you need to recut. This is heartbreaking.

I guess we are lucky it didnt hapen earlier in the series when you might have to recut some of those .

 

You'd really like to think so. My experience is that looking for that information in a library catalog is a lot like searching for the first issue CD entry on Amazon.com. All the entries are there. Each has an individual ID. But you need help, or your own experience, to find the edition you want. This is the problem Steve is describing.

All of a sudden the library is not like 'your local browsable record store', with it's staff who know where the Cajun section is hidden, but has become Netflix; you have a catalog, and an envelope.

 

You need to get these tapes in the hands of the Mormons, who I understand maintain all geneological and immigration records, even those of slaves.

 

Well this certainly sucks!

So, since I'll be picking up most of the OJC titles I've wanted but haven't been in a rush to get, can someone tell me what the mastering is like on the K2 versions of the jazz stuff, particularly Bill Evans? My only (less than positive) experience with it was with Willy and the Poor Boys. If that trend carries through, I'll be avoiding any K2 discs, so I figured I'd ask.

 

A quick search of local news shows that the current owner of the former Fantasy building has been evicting long-term tenants and raising rents.

I bet that's a huge part of this move.

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/article.cfm?archiveDate=03-30-07&storyID=26672

and several other pieces on the same theme.

 

It depends on how much knowledge and experience you have. An experienced researcher would (in most cases) not need help with an ordinary online catalogue. I think that the problem that Steve is describing is that he fears that the tapes that he needs for his work could get "lost" or that it would take lots of work just to find them, because the organisational structure that was present to retrieve them is being destroyed. That is a totally different problem from what you are describing.

 

Iron Mountain

Iron Mountain has many facilities, all over the country. They often look for large out-of-the-way spaces--like an abandoned train tunnel in Northern California--and convert them to their uses.

Having dealt extensively with Iron Mountain's people on the East and West Coasts with regard to various corporate media storage issues--and having inspected several of their facilities--I can tell you this:

---Everybody--and I mean EVERYBODY--in the music, film and television businesses uses them to store things like master tapes, film negatives, videotapes and the like.

---The people who work there--some of them are competent, some not--are at the mercy of coding. As in the Bad Company example Steve cites, if your coding is done haphazardly by people who don't know what they're doing, you might as well be throwing the material away. Unfortunately, bad coding (and careless human errors leading to bad coding) are shockingly common. Iron Mountain employees tend to be indifferent when it comes to doing coding work, and the result of their mistakes can be calamitous. (In fairness, corporate types who don't know how to tell IM what sorts of data to include in their coding, are also at fault here.)

--Most of these facilities are not set up like proper tape vaults, i.e. you can't simply walk around and try to find a misfiled tape simply by browsing the shelves. Tapes are often stored five or six deep on shelves that can sometimes only be accessed by forklift (It's a lot like the warehouse area of an Ikea store, only not so user-friendly.) Even if you can get to the tapes, they're stored by bar code number, not by artist, so it's impossible to locate anything except by blind luck.

---From my perspective, Iron Mountain is definitely in the storage business, but they are NOT in the retrieval business. What should be routine retrieval requests are often treated grudgingly, as if you (the client who is paying an exorbitant storage fee) are asking something extraordinarily inconvenient. Clients are also expected to PAY Iron Mountain each time they have something pulled, which also discourages companies from requesting items. The company actively discourages non-Iron Mountain employees from entering their facilities. The amount of red tape I've had to endure from Iron Mountain in order to go and look at material owned by the people I work for (who are, it bears repeating, clients paying vast sums to IM) is beyond belief. Most people simply give up--which is exactly what Iron Mountain wants them to do because it means less work.

---Here's a real-life Iron Mountain horror story, from my personal experience: While at an Iron Mountain facility (one of the ones that humans can actually get into) I once observed--but could do nothing about, as the material in question wasn't owned by my company--a massive collection of historically important musical material that had been incompetently coded so as to insure that none of it could ever be retrieved. Over 4000 items had simply been cataloged as "Misc." They were then sent to a distant Iron Mountain facility where no on-site visual inspection was available. In the event that the owners ever realize they need to retrieve some of their material, they will have no choice but to pull all 4000 items. But that will never occur, since a) they'll never be able to learn what they have from their spreadsheet and b) the amount that Iron Mountain would bill them to pull all of that stuff and then truck it all several hundred miles back to where someone could physically inspect it would be astronomical. The company in question might as well have set this stuff on fire for all the good it will ever do them. Instead, they'll be paying Iron Mountain to store it for decades to come.

--Most of this--especially in the music biz--has to do with the increasing unwillingness of bottom-line types at big media companies to maintain physical spaces--like Fantasy's facility--in which to store their assets. Putting everything in Iron Mountain allows them to sell off their real estate holdings for short term gain. The consequence is that a vast quantity of the cultural heritage of the last half-century is now in the grip of an organization that couldn't care less.

Ever seen the ending of "Citizen Kane"? That's Iron Mountain in a nutshell.

 

they offer their service even in Germany... http://www.ironmountain.de/digital/

 

You mean all that morally objectionable devil music?

 

Welcome to the forums, this is one great number 1 post. Nothing much to add except:

 

a horror story

 

But it does not appear the jobs have been outsourced to China or India. I bet few people know the following dirty little secret. Though most Chinese do not even know English, many of our nice, glossy product brochures are actually printed in China. After all the type-setting has been done on the computer for a print job, the job would be FedEx'ed over to China to be printed there. This invisible outsourcing has devastated the American workers in the printing industry.

 

I'm fairly new to the site and just starting to collect cd's again so any help would be appreciated.

This is bad news, but just because the tapes are being moved doesn't mean they will stop selling the existing OJC series of cd's does it?

Am I missing something here?

Thanks