Some good points here. Another thread discussing this issue is at How Well Do CDs last?, if you'd like to take a look at what some of us thought about it about a year ago.

"Premium" CD blank manufacturers are claiming "hundred year" life now, although I don't know of any who've had CDs around long enough to be sure. That's an extrapolation from "accelerated aging" tests which can give a fair indication of whether one medium is better than another, but putting a precise "life" on it is like saying how long one of us is going to last.

Conversion of old analog stuff to digital will probably help, because you can still pull up the same "bits" even if the individual bits get a little warped. The question of what media to put the bits on to archive them is still something of a puzzle. The only thing certain is that there's no such thing as a "permanent" medium. Any archiving method will require maintenance if we want the longest possible access to the "original" sounds.

John