The Day the Music Burned

[antipop]

"It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business — and almost nobody knew. This is the story of the 2008 Universal fire."

"Before long, firefighters switched tactics, using bulldozers to knock down the burning warehouse and clear away barriers to extinguishing the fire, including the remains of the UMG archive: rows of metal shelving and reels of tape, reduced to heaps of ash and twisted steel. Heavy machinery was still at work dismantling the building as night fell. The job was finished in the early morning of June 2, nearly 24 hours after the first flames appeared."

Great and very sad story about all the music that has been lost in that fire and that we'll never get to hear. It was filled with treasures that are irreplaceable and UMG was (and still is) very careless about.

This can make you quite mad about how they are destroying their heritage.

Here is the link to the article
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/m...ecordings.html

[For The Love of Music]

I would not think master copies are kept in a warehouse, but rather fireproof vaults.

[antipop]

Originally Posted by For The Love of Music

I would not think master copies are kept in a warehouse, but rather fireproof vaults.

Have you read the article?

[For The Love of Music]

Originally Posted by antipop

Have you read the article?

No, and not doubting it, was coming at it from the point of open exposure to avoid this type of situation

[Formerly YB-2]

Similar video storage disaster in a warehouse fire in Philadelphia many, many years earlier. Very sad in both cases.

[W9TR]

Wow - what a loss. Great article. Thanks for posting it.

[PHC1]

NASA lost/erased the original Apollo 11 moon landing tapes. No greater history could have been lost. Sad in both cases.

[antipop]

Originally Posted by Formerly YB-2

Similar video storage disaster in a warehouse fire in Philadelphia many, many years earlier. Very sad in both cases.

Yes the article points out that it's not the first instance that such accident happened.

[PHC1]

From the NYT article.

“Almost all of the master recordings stored in the vault were destroyed in the fire, including those produced by some of the most famous musicians since the 1940s.




In a confidential report in 2009, Universal Music Group estimated the loss at about 500,000 song titles.


The lost works most likely included masters in the Decca Records collection by Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald and Judy Garland. The fire probably also claimed some of Chuck Berry’s greatest recordings, produced for Chess Records, as well as the masters of some of Aretha Franklin’s first appearances on record.

Almost of all of Buddy Holly’s masters were lost, as were most of John Coltrane’s masters in the Impulse Records collection. The fire also claimed numerous hit singles, likely including Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” Etta James’s “At Last” and the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie.”


The list of artists affected spans decades of popular music. It includes recordings by Ray Charles, B.B. King, the Four Tops, Joan Baez, Neil Diamond, Sonny and Cher, Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Al Green, Elton John, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Buffett, the Eagles, Aerosmith, Rufus and Chaka Khan, Barry White, Patti LaBelle, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Police, Sting, Steve Earle, R.E.M., Janet Jackson, Guns N’ Roses, Mary J. Blige, No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, Snoop Dogg, Nirvana, Beck, Sheryl Crow, Tupac Shakur, Eminem, 50 Cent and the Roots.


Why are we only finding about this now?

At the time, the fire made news around the world, and the vault featured heavily in that coverage. But most articles focused only on the video recordings in the archive and, even then, news outlets largely characterized the disaster as a crisis averted.

Jody Rosen, the writer of the article, described the successful effort to play down the scope of the loss as a “triumph of crisis management” that involved officials working for Universal Music Group on both coasts. Those efforts were undoubtedly aimed at minimizing public embarrassment, but some suggest the company was also particularly worried about a backlash from artists and artist estates whose master recordings had been destroyed.

The real extent of the loss was laid out in litigation and company documents obtained by Mr. Rosen, a contributing writer for the magazine.






What are master recordings, and why do they matter?

A master recording is the one-of-a-kind original recording of a piece of music. It’s the source from which other vinyl records, CDs, MP3s and all other recordings are made.

According to the article, documents show that the vault contained masters dating back decades, including multitrack recordings on which individual instruments remained isolated from one another. There were also session masters, including recordings that had never been commercially released. The recordings within the vault came from to some of the most important record labels of all time.

Audiophiles and audio professionals view such recordings with special regard.

“A master is the truest capture of a piece of recorded music,” Adam Block, the former president of Legacy Recordings, Sony Music Entertainment’s catalog arm, told the magazine. “Sonically, masters can be stunning in their capturing of an event in time. Every copy thereafter is a sonic step away.”

[Still-One]

As I posted elsewhere.

If it isn't digitized and copies kept in multiple locations there is no totally fire safe location for audio or video content. All analog content is at risk of fire, flood or just age deterioration over time.

I am just guessing that the reason this isn't/wasn't a bigger deal is that 99.9% of the population could not care less about whether the content they hear is derived from a master whether analog or digital. Also, 98% of those who stream or purchase will never think about acquiring any of that lost content. Universal's bottom line isn't going to be materially impacted with the loss of those "masters". They just hoped any uproar would fade away.

I know I sound cynical but in another decade or at most another generation those artists will be as irrelevant as the big acts from the '30's and '40's. For those who view the loss from a historical perspective it is a huge loss. For almost everyone else it is irrelevant.