The End Of Out-Of-Print Music

Don't know if it is correct but I heard on the radio this weekend that 70% of the music recorded on records has never been released in another medium.

Unfortunately a sizable amount of music that was originally recorded on analog tape was not properly stored, or cataloged, and has substantially degraded, or is missing completely, so original releases or digital copies of original releases will be all that we have.

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Viridian...my stomach just sunk after reading your factoid.

Tragic.
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If the vinyl albums exists it is fairly easy, although time consuming, to convert them to digital. Tape only became widely used in audio recording in the 1950s and only a few of the big companies kept serious archives of their tapes. It really shouldn't be that surprising that the original masters for most music produced before, say 1980, have deteriorated or are just lost. Fortunately vinyl is a superb archival medium and the results of vinyl to digital transfers can be very high quality. If a vinyl recording had even moderate distribution existing copies can nearly always be found. This is true going back to the 1930s, but there are exceptions.

The situation for movies is far worst. It's estimated that 90% of all silent movies and half of all sound movies made before 1950 are lost.

I can download CD within 5min and movie within hour.
I still prefer hard copies

At the very beginning of CD analog many tapes were digitized with less than perfect A/D conversion resulting in noisy and often harsh recordings. The only remedy is to digitize it again if analog tapes still exist.