Doomsday vault for music recordings planned on Arctic island

Norwegian company Elire is planning to create a doomsday vault to preserve the world’s most important music recordings for at least 1,000 years, with the same safeguards offered by the Arctic World Archive and the Global Seed Vault, two existing storage facilities housed underground in the Svalbard archipelago, Billboard reports. Buried almost 1,000 feet below a snow-covered mountain, on an arctic island Svalbard midway between Norway and the North Pole, and using future-proof digital storage, the vault will store recordings of everything from major-label pop hits like the Beatles to Australian Indigenous music. The vault is built to withstand the kind of extreme electromagnetic pulses that could result from a nuclear explosion, which could permanently damage electronic equipment and play havoc with digital files. An extra level of protection will come from Svalbard’s low temperature and dry permafrost conditions. Elire intends to make money by charging companies and individuals for deposits to the vault. It also plans to make the vault’s contents accessible to listeners around the world, when it has the permission of rights holders, and share the revenue this generates with creators.