Lost media is any media that is believed to no longer exist in any format, or for which any copies cannot be located. The term primarily encompasses visual, audio, or audiovisual media such as films, television and radio broadcasts, music,[1] and video games.[2] [3]
Many television and radio broadcast masters, recorded onto magnetic tape, may be lost due to the industry practice of wiping. Motion picture studios also often destroyed their original nitrate film elements, as film and broadcast material was often considered ephemeral and of little historical worth after they had made their revenue. Some media considered lost may exist in studio or public archives, but may not be available due to copyright or donor restriction rules.[4] Due to unstable nature of any format, film, tape, phonograph record, optical discs like CDs and DVDs, and digital data stored on hard drives, all naturally degrade over time, especially if not kept in correct storage conditions.
Preservation efforts attempt to avoid the loss of works; this is usually done by storing them in archives, one example being the Arctic World Archive, which has been the chosen location for the preservation of the code on public repositories on GitHub[5] along with a wide range of data of interest to multiple companies, institutions and governments; including the Constitutions of Brazil and Norway.[6]
See main article: Lost film. A large portion of silent films made in the United States are now considered lost. A 2013 report made by the United States Library of Congress estimates that 70 percent of silent films made in the United States have been completely lost.[7]
See main article: Lost television broadcast. Lost television broadcasts are mostly those early television programs which cannot be accounted for in studio archives (or in personal archives); this is usually because of deliberate destruction or neglect.
See also: Rare groove and Lostwave. The Library of Congress estimates that a large portion of the earliest musical recordings, from the late 19th century to the early 20th century, have been lost. For example, only two percent of the over 3000 wax cylinders produced by the North American Phonograph Company between 1889 and 1894 are part of the National Recording Preservation Board's sound recording library .[8]
A concept related to lost music is "lostwave", a term coined on the Internet for extant recordings of music for which little to no information about its authors or origin exists. Some examples of lostwave, such as "The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet" and "Ulterior Motives", has been the subject of online crowdsourced research since the late 2010s.[9] [10] [11]
Video games, including digital downloads, often fade from existence when digital game stores close, as demonstrated by the Wii Shop Channel, V Cast Network and the Nintendo eShop on the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. The infamous P.T., a teaser to the unreleased Silent Hills game, became unable to be redownloaded after its removal from the PlayStation Network within a year.[12] The Wii U and Nintendo 3DS digital download games Dodge Club Party and Dodge Club Pocket were removed from Nintendo eShop in 2019 and 2022 and became publicly unavailable due to reasons beyond Nintendo's control.[13]
According to the Video Game History Foundation, 87% of American video games released before 2010 are out of print and cannot be acquired outside of the grey market or piracy. Many of these titles are in danger of becoming lost, or already are.[14]
Data stored in electronic computers risks being lost if it is not frequently migrated into more recent file formats. This happens because as new computer systems are developed and new technologies are built, now obsolete systems may break down over time, leaving the data inside inaccessible.[15] Electronic data preservation is further complicated by the fact that unless an emulator for a given computer system which can decode the data is present at the time of the preservation, the original data may become inaccessible as the original hardware breaks down, as it may depend on the original hardware to be decoded,[16] although in some cases the original data may be recoverable through lengthy reverse engineering work with the objective of understanding the original computer system enough to decode the most original electronic data possible.[17]
Media released on the internet, such as livestreams and blog posts, are especially vulnerable to being lost due to a number of issues, such as a website being shut down, it being deleted by the creator without being archived, or never having been archived in the first place.