Doomsday plans seem to be multiplying these days, and according to a report by Billboard and New Musical Express (NME), one Norwegian company is planning a doomsday vault to preserve musical treasures. The vault is to be located on an arctic island midway between the North Pole and Norway.
The Oslo-based Elire Management Group claims the vault, which they named the Global Music Vault says that it is supposed to preserve everything from Australian Indigenous music to classics by The Beatles.
According to the Group’s projections, the vault will endure for at least 1,000 years, buried on the Svalbard archipelago beneath ice and snow at a depth of 1,000 feet. The storage technology for the Global Music Vault was developed by Piql, using binary coding and high-density QR codes written onto special durable optical film.
Joining forces with the Paris-based International Council to determine which music will go under, Elire said their goal is to be open to all kinds of music, from all around the world. “We don’t want to just protect a certain genre and certain era,” commented Luke Jenkinson, managing director of the Global Music Vault and managing partner at Elire.
For their part, Piql further claims the vault will be able to withstand electromagnetic pulses from a nuclear explosion that would normally deal permanent damage to electronic equipment and corrupt digital files.
The company’s goal is to complete the Vault in early 2022, with the first “deposit” set to focus on the preservation of Indigenous music with pop efforts to follow.
