Music Collection Ever- -... | The Largest Multitrack

Under the leadership of Jody Klein (son of legendary manager Allen Klein), ABKCO has amassed a collection that rivals that of the Library of Congress. While Universal Music Group holds massive archive, the largest multitrack music collection ever assembled in one contiguous, climate-controlled space is widely believed to belong to this independent entity.

Furthermore, digital formats become obsolete every decade (DAT, ADAT, DCC). The collection includes 12,000 ADAT tapes that require a specific Alesis machine last manufactured in 2003. They have four machines left. When those break, the data on those tapes is gone forever. You cannot visit. If you attempted to find the facility, you would find a nondescript industrial park with no signage. Security is provided by former military contractors. The external power grid is backed by three tier-4 diesel generators and a solar array. The Largest Multitrack Music Collection Ever- -...

However, you can hear the collection. Every time you listen to the 2019 remix of Let It Bleed , or the 2023 Dolby Atmos version of "A Change Is Gonna Come," you are listening to a digital clone of a tape pulled from this vault. The largest multitrack music collection ever assembled is more than a warehouse of plastic and rust. It is the sonic equivalent of the Rosetta Stone. In those 250,000 reels lies the truth of how music was made: the missed cues, the magic takes, the studio banter between songs, and the half-second of silence where an engineer lit a cigarette. Under the leadership of Jody Klein (son of

This is a race against entropy. At current transfer speeds (one reel = 3 hours of real-time playback), it will take the archive to digitize everything they currently own. The Legal Minefield One might ask: If this is the largest collection, why haven't we heard all the outtakes? The collection includes 12,000 ADAT tapes that require

By the 1990s, ABKCO had amassed over 150,000 reels of tape. Today, that number exceeds . The Anatomy of the Archive To visualize the largest multitrack music collection ever assembled, you must imagine a fortress built for a paranoid audiophile.