[Gay State Conservative]

I have a commercial music CD that I bought in ‘87 (Tijuana Brass,IIRC) that still plays perfectly.I have data and music CD-Rs that are 15 years old that have preserved their data perfectly.Pretty amazing,IMO.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

The M-Disk will go well beyond 15 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

[zeugma]

I still have the very first CD I ever purchased. (DSOTM) Yes, it still plays. There is a big difference between music and data though, because CD players were designed to recover gracefully from errors. If you miss a few bits of a song, you won't notice while listening, but if you drop bits from your files, the result can be quickly catastrophic. I must say though, that I'm extremely happy with how long my music CDs have lasted. cdparanoia can actually report how successful it is in ripping the data off a CD.