If the mid-'70s footage in MARTIN SCORSESE's new BOB DYLAN doc looks a little less than ideal, it may be because it's sourced from a scratchy work print of the 1978 Dylan film RENALDO AND CLARA. The original negatives, which would have been everyone's preferred source, have gone missing, a source in Dylan's camp told ROLLING STONE. The culprits: corporate consolidation and a numbering system for locating archived material that "somehow... fell off" over the years. Companies changed hands, raw materials changed hands, and the master key, so to speak, no longer exists. The footage might be in an IRON MOUNTAIN storage facility, but it doesn't matter because there's no way to find it there. It may be sitting in a box behind four or five other boxes on a high shelf in the middle of a sea of shelves in a vast, climate-controlled, underground warehouse, with no identifying marks, and it might as well be at the bottom of the MARIANA TRENCH. This is one of several ways that master tapes of classic (and not so classic) music can and will go missing, too, as archival producer ANDY ZAX outlines in this account of "how stupidity, incompetence, obsolescence, carelessness, greed, malfeasance, lazy lawyers and a basic misunderstanding of physics are—at this very moment!—eviscerating what’s left of our musical heritage." Zax delivered this speech in 2014. It mentions—and is newly relevant because of—the 2008 fire that incinerated a large chunk of UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP's tape archives. But that was yesterday's rantnrave. The question today, and going forward, is where and how and what are your archives now? How are master tapes of 40-year-old analog recordings being stored? Where are they being stored? Who has the keys? Who will still have the keys 10 and 20 years from now? And how are master files of 40-day-old digital recordings being archived? Where is the metadata being filed away? Who's going to be able to access it 30 or 40 years from now and what equipment are they going to use to do so? Are there Linear Tape-Open (LTO) backups? What's the last time the backups were backed up or upgraded? Who's going to be able to read *those* in 30 or 40 years? How many librarians do you have on staff? What's the business case for making sure all of this happens, and who's going to do it anyway when someone in corporate can't make that business case? Where will the 2059 version of GILES MARTIN source her BEYONCÉ recordings for that year's solar system-wide reissue, and what equipment will she use to play them? What's being done in 2019 to prepare for that? What are labels doing? Publishers? Artists? You?... Speaking of metadata, JAXSTA is now in public beta. JACQUI LOUEZ SCHOORL, co-founder of the ambitious credit database, envisions it as "IMDB meets LINKEDIN meets BLOOMBERG for the music industry." More on this soon... SPOTIFY no longer wants to compete with your car radio. It wants to be your car radio... Viral hits of the humpback whales... RIP VELVEL PASTERNAK and SPENCER BOHREN.