How Long Do Vinyl Records Last?

Late 1880s – 1929

Wax Cylinders

The first records weren’t discs. Wax cylinders were sold from the late 1880s until about 1915, and plastic ones until 1929.¹

Archivists call them very fragile: they warp and break, and wax ones grow mould in damp storage.¹² Even so, one university library has put more than 10,000 cylinder recordings online, transferred by playing them on a modern cylinder player.³

1897 – late 1950s

Shellac 78s

Shellac 78s were made from 1897 until the late 1950s. They’re brittle: drop one and it can shatter.¹

Archivists say pressed shellac records, unless badly stored, “have proved to be fairly stable over many decades”.² A national library digitised 10,000 records made between 1901 and 1925 by playing them.³

1948 – today

Vinyl Records

The vinyl LP arrived in June 1948,¹ and records are still made and played today; new turntables are still being built.²

Archivists rate vinyl as “chemically very stable”³ and say pressed records have, generally, “proved stable so far”.⁴ What harms a record is scratches, wear from playing and heat, which is why the way you keep one matters (more on that below).

1970s – 2000s

Cassettes and Digital Tape

Cassettes were most popular from the 1970s to the 1990s. Archivists don’t count them as an archival format, giving them a “very limited projected lifespan of 10 to 30 years”.¹ Tape can stretch, break, grow mould or get chewed up by the player.¹

Many tapes made since the mid-1970s suffer “sticky shed”: the binder that holds the recording breaks down and the tape squeals.² Digital audio tape arrived in 1987; the machines are no longer made, and archivists call it obsolete.¹³

In 2012 the US national recording preservation plan said many analogue recordings “must be digitized within the next 15 to 20 years”.⁴

1982 – today

CDs and DVDs

CDs arrived in 1982 and DVDs in 1995.¹ A national conservation institute rates pressed audio CDs at 50 to 100 years, from lab tests of heat and humidity.²

But CDs aren’t permanent either. Their thin metal layer can corrode so the laser can’t read it, which archivists call disc “rot”.³ Some CDs made at one UK plant between 1988 and 1993 did just that.⁴ In a 15-year national library test, about 4% of 125 audio CDs went past the error limit.⁵

Burned CDs are far less stable than pressed ones, and archives copy a CD’s contents to new media periodically to keep it.⁶

1950s – today

Hard Drives and Downloads

Archivists call a single hard drive “an inherently unreliable data carrier”; the safe way to keep files is several copies in a well-run system.¹ In one data-centre fleet of more than 300,000 drives, failure rates rose with age and peaked at about ten years old, at 4.25% a year.²

Formats move on, too. In 2003 a US standards lab noted that digital media from 20 years earlier were already incompatible with most systems.³ In 2008 one online music store stopped issuing the keys that let bought songs play on a new computer; after complaints, it offered refunds.⁴⁵

1990s – today

SSDs, USB Sticks and Memory Cards

For flash memory, archivists say “no realistic guesses are available” for how long it lasts, and advise copying its contents to another medium at the earliest chance.¹

The industry standard only requires a fully worn SSD to keep its data for one year unplugged,² and even industrial memory cards are rated for 10 years when new and one year when worn out.³ Flash makers themselves say important files should always be backed up on other media.⁴

2000s – today

Cloud and Streaming

Streaming catalogues change. What’s available “varies over time and between countries”, depending on permission from rights holders.¹ Licences change, and tracks can come and go.

What you upload can go, too. One early music site lost years of its users’ uploads, an estimated 50 million songs, in a server move.² Almost 4 in 10 web pages from 2013 had gone a decade later.³ Some free photo clouds may delete your pictures after two years without use.⁴

Archivists even have a name for digital data going bad: “bit rot”, “the corruption of the lowest level of digital data”.⁵ A national library study concluded that analogue recordings made more than 100 years ago are likelier to survive than digital recordings made today.⁶