Iron Mountain Helps Codigo Music Preserve Latin American Music History

Codigo Music, owners of one of the most extensive collections of Latin American musical recordings, has selected Iron Mountain, Inc. to help catalogue, archive, digitize and preserve its extensive library of historic and contemporary recordings.

The project, begun earlier this year, will help ensure that Codigo’s rich collection will remain secure, protected and available for current and future generations of Latin fans and artists.

Among Codigo’s many assets is the catalog of iconic Latin music label Fania, which it acquired in 2008. Following the acquisition, Codigo determined that the Fania catalog, much like many other large music collections, face two main challenges: multiple recording media formats, and the threat of deterioration of that media due to the ravages of time, environment and technology obsolescence. With time not on their side, Codigo looked to Iron Mountain to help quickly ‘triage’ these priceless recordings, categorizing and classifying them according to format and the condition they were in, while providing with a safe storage environment. With that work done, Iron Mountain and Codigo can work together to digitize and make available those recordings while also ensuring they remain protected and preserved in Iron Mountain’s secure storage locations.

“The Fania catalog is viewed as the Motown of Latin music,” states Bruce McIntosh, Codigo Music SVP and GM. “Some of the artists that you will recognize [include] Tito Puente, Ce, Cruz, Hector Lavoe, Willie Colon, Ruben 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 US 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 becoming moldy and 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.“

Continues McIntosh, “The great thing about Iron Mountain is we don’t have to actually take the asset out and ship it and turn it over to a DJ. They have the studio onsite. We can pull the tapes out, have them transferred, have them digitized and sent to us on a link within a day to have those seeded out to different DJs and then they can transfer a format to us while maintaining the original asset there, safely kept. The quality of the studio work going on up there with Iron Mountain is top notch. The value of working with Iron Mountain for us has been twofold. It’s been able to maximize our revenues as a company and also preserve part of the Latin cultural history here.“

Iron Mountain’s Entertainment Services was established to meet the needs of clients’ archives in film, music, television, academia and entertainment, while providing security and safety tailored to these market sectors. Through Iron Mountain’s industry approach to security, clients can rest assured that their works will be safe and accessible for future generations, using the company’s technological expertise and best practices in the preservation of their most critical assets. Iron Mountain currently stores nearly 27 million individual media elements (films, music recording, videos, etc.) for 1200 customers in eight dedicated facilities around the world, digitizing one million assets and storing more than 50PB of data.

“The Latin American market sector is extremely important to Iron Mountain, and we are happy to provide our services for Codigo and an iconic label like Fania,” stated Jeff Anthony, SVP business unit leader, Iron Mountain Entertainment Services. “The music industry landscape is rapidly changing, and keeping our clients’ assets current presents unique challenges, but the preservation of historic, classic recordings is our number-one priority, and our role is to help in every way we can.“