It will absolutely cease to exist. It will disappear forever. It will become just a memory in an old fool s cluttered up and confused head. This is quite apart from the fact that even if the master DAT tapes did survive, the 44.1 sampling rate will not have preserved the music at a high resolution. In a Silent Way , remastered from the 25 year old as was original analogue master tapes, the importance of completely professional, high stability, maximum fidelity mastering cannot be overstressed.
Today there are thousands of master tapes that are literally falling to bits.
This due to a manufacturing error that occurred in the mid 1970 s at the factory of one of the worlds leading master tape manufacturers, Ampex. When these badly manufactured tapes are put onto a machine, the magnetic material shreds off of the plastic substrate, the binding glue having decomposed. Because the molecular resolution vinyl examples have survived longer than the tapes, these pieces of music have escaped oblivion. DAT masters often will not play back on the same day that they were recorded. Often a DAT will only play on the machine that it was originally recorded on.