There’s no need to worry about the future of music anymore (or for the next 1,000 years at least) thanks to one shrewd Norwegian company.
The Oslo-based Elire Management Group are planning to build a doomsday vault to protect music, according to Billboard. The ‘Global Music Vault’ will include a wide variety of different music, including everything from The Beatles to Australian indigenous music.
They’ve picked a safe place for it too: it will be located between Norway and the North Pole, deep under ice. Nobody’s going to access that easily.
Elire Management Group have also combined with another Norwegian company, Piql, a data security firm, who promise that the vault can safely last for 1,000 years and even withstand the threat of a nuclear explosion. The vault will have the same safeguards as the Arctic World Archive and the Global Seed Vault, which already exist underneath the same permafrost Svalbard archipelago.
To determine which music makes it into the vault, a tremendously difficult thing to decide, Elire are working with the International Music Council to form a global committee that will select the “most precious and loved” music from around the world, as per Consequence of Sound. Their goal is to be open to all types of music, not limiting it to one genre or one country.
Elire also plan to profit from the project by letting major record labels pay them to store their records in the vault. That’s surely going to lead to some really rubbish choices for future civilisations to come across when they finally open the vault.
As it stands, the vault will be completed in 2022. Thankfully it seems that the general public will also be given the chance to vote on national submissions as well. What Australian music do you think deserves to be stored in the hallowed doomsday vault? As long as The Wiggles make it in, I’m happy.
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