The GRAMMY Museum®

As The GRAMMY Museum’s official preservation partner, Iron Mountain preserves the soundtrack of history  

Industry

• Entertainment
• Music
• Cultural Preservation

Challenge

Collect and secure assets documenting the recording process and GRAMMY history.

Solution

Provided private vaults and a secure digital archive.

Value

• Preserved 120 TB of the museum’s history
• Improved the accessibility and security of the museum’s assets
• Enabled new licensing opportunities

Founded in 2008, the GRAMMY Museum promotes the value of the arts in musical education, preservation, exhibitions and public programming. The Museum has interactive touchscreens, videos, recording booths, and a collection of historical music artifacts including costumes and instruments from the GRAMMY Awards, handwritten lyrics, records, and audio/video recordings. Their musical archive connects museum visitors - both in person and online - to the history of sound. Iron Mountain has been a supporter of the GRAMMY Museum since 2013.

Physical storage

The Museum has curated hundreds of exhibitions since its inception and needed assistance with physical storage. The Museum houses one-of-a-kind items in its two private vaults, including the piano that Bruno Mars played at the GRAMMY and costumes from legendary artists. Storing historic assets in climate controlled, private vaults totaling 1000 cubic feet enables the Museum to use its visitor space for cutting-edge exhibits, improving the security and accessibility of on-site assets.

Digitization

The GRAMMY Museum regularly hosts more than 100 live shows annually in its Clive Davis Theatre. All these events are filmed, generating a vast, evergrowing volume of master recordings and associated data. The Iron Mountain studio team first digitized 786 video tapes, including various formats like DVC pro, Beta SP, and Mini DV. More recently, the studio team digitized 36 DigiBeta tapes, migrated to hard drives and restored six hard drives (approximately 19 TB total). The Museum also had Iron Mountain restore 33 hard drives, totaling 67 TB, written to LTO8, featuring GRAMMY shows and specials between 1963-2019.

Digital storage

The Museum recognized the urgent need for a secure, off-site, cloud accessible, and easily managed solution to protect its one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable footage. Storing the only master copy locally meant a high risk of losing all assets in the event of a data failure or system crash. Moreover, the former storage system was slow, particularly for remote access, which proved extremely frustrating and inefficient, especially when staff needed to retrieve content quickly from wherever they were physically located.

Iron Mountain managed the initial data migration, taking an estimated 40 terabytes (TB) of existing footage from physical drives into Iron Mountain’s secure media archive platform. The platform is designed as a secure, long term digital archive optimised for rich media like video, audio, and stills. It ensures a high level of data integrity by keeping three copies of data with geographical separation across the country, eliminating the single point of failure. The platform also provides unparalleled accessibility with metadata tags and timecodes with an AI-powered search engine. The GRAMMY Museum maintains multiple users with privileges to search, access and manage content. Currently, 120TB of data is safely stored and accessible for the GRAMMY Museum.

Safeguarding the soundtrack of history

The GRAMMY Museum’s needs for security, storage, digitization and accessibility are a perfect match with Iron Mountain’s expertise in secure chain of custody, digitization and conversion.

• Assured preservation
  The Museum now has confidence that its unique performances, including those by artists no longer with us, are safely archived and protected against on-site disasters. The Museum's post-production workflow now includes automatic, immediate upload of footage to Iron Mountain’s secure media archive platform, providing peace of mind to the GRAMMY Museum. The Museum also has one-of-kind artist artifacts stored in climate controlled vaults, available for future exhibits or educational opportunities.
• Improved efficiency and accessibility
  Remote access, particularly vital in a wired and/or remote world, is now simple and efficient, allowing authorised users to access and distribute content quickly from anywhere.
• Enhanced licensing opportunities
  The system's ability to easily retrieve original, high-resolution content, including multiple camera angles, has provided excellent licensing opportunities for documentaries, films, and directors.
• Readied for future innovation
  The Museum is positioned to take advantage of Iron Mountain’s secure media archive platform, including the cloud experience that uses generative AI to support more advanced, natural language search and faster content discovery. The partnership with Iron Mountain and the implementation of the secure media archive platform dramatically improves the GRAMMY Museum's preservation workflow and content accessibility, securing its legacy for future generations.