Norwegian company Elire Management Group has taken the idea of wanting to forever preserve our most treasured music to a whole new level: by making a time capsule full of music and burying it for 1,000 years. You heard that right! How will they store the music though? The company will take master-quality digital copies of the music that they want to include in the vault (Global Music Vault) and store them away in the specially built capsules.

Their reason for this is that they stated most digital storage mediums have a limited lifetime and hardware, software and file formats become obsolete as time goes on. Their solution to this has been to create a revolutionary type of technology that will, according to their website, be unveiled to the world soon. The technology will be built to keep these master-quality digital copies of the songs they put in safe for over 1,000 years no matter how much technology changes from now to then. They have also said that the stored data can withstand extreme electromagnetic exposure, and will also survive disasters such as apocalypses and nuclear explosions.

Image credit: Spencer Lowell

As for the type of music, it will have everything starting with early recordings from indigenous people which will eventually work its way up to modern recordings to have a wide variety of worldwide music spanning centuries, and a global committee will be working closely with the Global Music Vault team to decide what music goes into the vault. Will there be music from any of our favourite DJs? We’ll have to wait and see, but it will certainly be interesting to see the end result of all of this.

“We want to preserve the music that has shaped us as human beings and shaped our nations. We don’t want to just protect a certain genre and certain era. We want the nations and regions of the world to curate what music gets deposited.” – Luke Jenkinson, project managing director, via Billboard 

The vault will be buried far underground in a mountain in far north Norway on the Svalbard archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, which is a demilitarised zone in 42 countries, meaning that military installations, activities or personnel are forbidden. They have stated that the safety, security and remoteness have made this an ideal location for the vault to be buried, ensuring it will be undisturbed. Furthermore, the dry permafrost conditions also ensure longevity of the stored data.

To find out more about this exciting and unique project, visit the website here.