The race to save old tapes is on. Magnetic tape, the recording medium for music from the late 1940s through to the digital era, doesn’t age well. The older a tape gets, the more fragile it becomes.
The glue holding the microscopic magnetic particles to the tape itself dries out. Once the little bits of magnetic material flake off, the musical information it once contained is lost forever. If you try to play an old tape, all the music will disappear in a cloud of dust. This is known as “sticky shed syndrome” or “hydrolysis.”
That’s why there are companies all over the world working to preserve the planet’s supply of music on tape by literally baking it in an oven to restore the glue’s stickiness. And surprisingly, it’s not the really old stuff. Tape manufacturers changed their formulation in the 70s, and for the rest of the decade and into the decades, the industry used which degraded even faster than the stuff from the 1960s. More next time.
© 2026 Corus Radio, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
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