The End Of Out-Of-Print Music

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Viridian...my stomach just sunk after reading your factoid.

Tragic.
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If the vinyl albums exists it is fairly easy, although time consuming, to convert them to digital. Tape only became widely used in audio recording in the 1950s and only a few of the big companies kept serious archives of their tapes. It really shouldn't be that surprising that the original masters for most music produced before, say 1980, have deteriorated or are just lost. Fortunately vinyl is a superb archival medium and the results of vinyl to digital transfers can be very high quality. If a vinyl recording had even moderate distribution existing copies can nearly always be found. This is true going back to the 1930s, but there are exceptions.

The situation for movies is far worst. It's estimated that 90% of all silent movies and half of all sound movies made before 1950 are lost.

I can download CD within 5min and movie within hour.
I still prefer hard copies

At the very beginning of CD analog many tapes were digitized with less than perfect A/D conversion resulting in noisy and often harsh recordings. The only remedy is to digitize it again if analog tapes still exist.

This is a nice idea but probably only in theory. There is a lot of stuff that was never remastered and made available digitally via CD. Even if it were only made available via download, there's still a lot of work to bring it to market. And that's probably the reason that it never went to CD either. Yes, downloads are less expensive, but as Kijanki pointed out, CDs aren't really that expensive to manufacture. -I do agree though that it would be great to have all those older titles available for download so we could hear them again. I sold my last turntable over 20 years ago and have never looked back.