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Iron Mountain Preserves Fania

Music catalogs are among the most important assets in. the modern music industry, and Codigo Music, owners of one of the most extensive collections of Latin American musical recordings, is no exception. With that in mind, the company has been working with storage and information management company Iron Mountain Inc. to catalogue, archive, digitize and preserve its extensive library of historic and contemporary recordings.

Los Angeles, CA (November 18, 2015)–Music catalogs are among the most important assets in. the modern music industry, and Codigo Music, owners of one of the most extensive collections of Latin American musical recordings, is no exception. With that in mind, the company has been working with storage and information management company Iron Mountain Inc. to catalogue, archive, digitize and preserve its extensive library of historic and contemporary recordings.

Among Codigo’s holdings is the Latin music label Fania, acquired in 2008, which had been preserved across multiple recording media formats, all of which faced the possibility of deterioration and obsolescence. With that in mind, Iron Mountain sorted the recordings, categorizing and classifying them according to format and the condition they were in, while providing them with a proper storage environment. Now the two companies will work together to digitize and make the recordings available while keeping them secured and preserved in Iron Mountain’s storage locations.

“The Fania catalog is viewed as the Motown of Latin music,” said Bruce McIntosh, Codigo Music senior VP & general manager. “Some of the artists that you will recognize [include] Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Héctor Lavoe, Willie Colón, Rubén Blades, and of course the Fania All-Stars. This music is a big part of American culture. It’s basically a cultural institution for Hispanics in the U.S. When we started with the purchase, we found many different formats, some of which were not in the best condition—everything from 1/4 inch masters to golden DVDs, to DAT tapes. 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 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.”

With modern distribution methods, the original catalog items don’t leave Iron Mountain either when the need for their contents arises. Instead, they’re transferred onsite in the storage company’s facility and sent out digitally while the original asset goes back to storage. That is fine with McIntosh, who remarked, “The quality of the studio work going on up there with Iron Mountain is top notch. It’s been able to maximize our revenues as a company and also preserve part of the Latin cultural history here.”

Iron Mountain currently stores nearly 27 million individual media elements (films, music recording, videos, etc.) for 1,200 customers in eight dedicated facilities around the world, digitizing one million assets and storing more than 50 petabytes of data.

Iron Mountain Incorporated
www.ironmountain.com

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