I'd never heard about that before, either (not having had tape storage as a primary job), but a colleague was quite surprised by 20-30% failure rates for tapes first used within a year and asked our drive vendor about it. At the time, there was nothing mentioned on the media we bought and the tape vendor didn't have any official docs but the drive technician we dealt with said that it was well known among the support group - apparently a lot of customers either didn't know or didn't assume it'd be so dramatic.

They don't mention the rates though