Yesterday, The New York Times’ published a wild, deeply sad story alleging that the 2008 fire that swept through Universal Studios Hollywood destroyed roughly 500,000 master recordings, a figure that Universal Music Group, who owned the recordings, downplayed at the time and continues to dispute. Now, in the aftermath of the story, a number of artists are pondering the fate of their own masters—the original recording of any piece of music and an integral component in the remastering process—and coming to terms with the fact that the masters may be lost forever.
One of them is Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, who replied to a Twitter user on Tuesday saying he fears the masters for the band’s seminal Nevermind are “gone forever.”
He’s not alone, either. R.E.M., Roseanne Cash, Asia, and The Roots’ Questlove are also in the process of determining the fate of several of their albums. Management for Steely Dan, too, issued a statement to Variety. “We have been aware of ‘missing’ original Steely Dan tapes for a long time now,” reads the statement. “We’ve never been given a plausible explanation. Maybe they burned up in the big fire. In any case, it’s certainly a lost treasure.”
The loss is said to have also impacted artists including Joni Mitchell, Aretha Franklin, Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, and many, many more.
[via Variety, L.A. Times]
85 Comments
In a manner of speaking, aren’t we all lost in a universal fire?
I dunno I just can’t bring myself to be too upset about this with all that’s going on in the world. Anything unreleased or much older and in need of a remaster is a loss, but Nevermind? It sounds fine to me as is. But then I’m not an audiophile so maybe someone can explain to me why this is so tragic.
I handle the archiving of all the footage shot at my company, and I’m rather appalled by Universal’s practices here. What were they doing storing masters on site? My employer is no major studio by any means, but everything we shoot, we maintain redundancies, keeping copies on site for access, and the originals off site at a climate controlled storage facility equipped with fire suppression technology. And I know a lot of other studios actually store their most precious masters at the same facility that I use, out here in the midwest, because they are concerned about fires and earthquakes in Cali. Sadly, Universal has had a reputation of being one of the more neglectful media producers, going back decades. In the 1940s, they junked their ENTIRE silent film archive. Those titles they made from the 20s that survive only do so because either other archives possessed prints, or because private collectors saved 16mm prints made for the home market. This recent fire is going to go down as one of the greatest tragedies in terms of our cultural history, right up there with the 1965 MGM fire and the 1937 Fox fire.
“What were they doing storing masters on site?”$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$It’s like network security in IT: Management sees no value in spending money on it until it’s too late and then it’s all ‘Why didn’t you tell us we could get hacked and lose millions of dollars?!?!”
As someone who works in TV and has seen during our current digital landscape many production companies say “no” to purchasing extra hard drives for copying all shot media onto before delivering to post (just in case the day’s drive gets destroyed or lost in transit) your answer is the most correct one. It’s just all about money until it’s too late.
Not surprising at all.
And it’s crazy because the technology is so cheap. I archive onto LTO tapes that cost 25 bucks apiece and store 2.5 tbs. And there’s newer generations that are even larger capacity. The cost investment versus the risk is minimal.
One of our clients got hit by Emotet super hard. After clean up, we implemented draconian new policies such as changing your password every 90 days and everybody gets their own username and no more local admins no matter how good you are with computers. Of course, we’d been trying to get them to quit with the shared logins and domain users as admins and the weak passwords since they hired us, but everyone knows you only hire IT consultants in order to disagree with them, so it took Emotet to wake them up. They were down for a couple days. Lost a ton of time and resources in recovery. We got them straightened out in the end.For about 6 months. Soon, they hired a new person who is to be our main contact. No shit, first request: “The drivers think its too hard to remember their passwords. Please set them all to Pepsi123 and email me a list of usernames.” The best part was the new hire had recently left a previous position at a different client we service that also learned the hard way about not fucking around with network security not a whole year earlier. Honestly, I think some companies deserve to have their money stolen.
Haha yep sounds very familiar. The company I work for owns a TV station and those guys will not fucking stop it with the shared logins, at some point they’re gonna get screwed.
“changing your password every 90 days”Isn’t this one the more old-school security practices that isn’t anywhere near as effective as people think it is?
Well, in the case of Emotet, the virus is designed to harvest usernames and passwords. Changing your password every 90 days (more often if I could convince them) greatly reduces the chance that your harvested credentials remain relevant for too long. I recommend using a password manager to allow for complex passwords and easy password resetting. LastPass is my jam.EDIT: Additionally, changing your password will also help with making sure your favorite password “Password but with a zero instead of an O” isn’t being used on every single account you have that uses your email address as the username. You should probably change your password.
“You should probably change your password”My collection of multi-symbol, 20-30 character long passphrases? Fuck that.
I switched to a password manager a few years back. I’m bad at changing passwords periodically, but practically everyone of my passwords is a series of consonants, punctuation and numbers. Minimum of 20 characters when I can. I also have my main password to the manager printed out in a deposit box.I have tried my damndest over the years to convince “civilians” to look into password managers, but their eyes either glaze over, or they insist that the combo of their infallible, computer-like memories and haphazard Post It notes works just as well as my software.Oy…
Correct. It turns out that the “change your password frequently” guidance was really just the opinion of one guy at NIST, and then years later he’s like “Yeah that isn’t actually a great practice, people should stop doing that.” A strong password (plus proper secured 2FA) is orders of magnitude stronger than changing a weak password periodically.
Unfortunately, that only applies to cracking passwords through brute force, and that isn’t how people get passwords anymore. “Hackers” just ask for them, and users give them up willingly with alarming regularity. People click links in emails and just drop credentials into whatever field says Password. Those passwords are stored along with usernames, complied into various lists and traded with others. Changing your password ensures that those lists don’t stay fresh. Enforcing a solid password policy encourages good password practices among users. It’s very important to rotate out passwords regularly.
Thanks! I never would have known any of that had you not told me, and also if I hadn’t been a web developer intimately involved in computer security procedures for the last twenty years. Want to netsplain me about how to use bcrypt while you’re at it? :)Yeah, giving your password directly to attackers obviously means you need to change your password. If a user is an idiot then changing passwords regularly will help. But if someone can’t prevent themselves from doing that, getting them to change their passwords with regularity is essentially pointless.
You’ve just hit two of the corner squares in the IT industry bingo card: the person who prefaces his or her reasons for disagreeing with a valid pont with “I’ve been a [IT role] for [X] years,” and the attitude that everyone else is an idiot.
My actual reason for disagreeing is that “change your password every X days” is not a sound general policy because it leads to weak passwords, user frustration, and a reduction in users’ respect for security protocols. The “20 years” thing was just to remind our fine Chancellor that he should be careful ‘splaining things to people who already know them.
I’m so glad you said something. I just gave him his star and left.
No, its part of the most comprehensive security measures out there, which is knowledge.Lots of places are moving to 30 day resets now due to more stringent compliance requirements.
If i have to tell one more vendor to stop using shared logins……
Seems like they found it hard until it was hard to find.Oh, well. Whatever.
Curious as you seem like a person who knows the answer: Do these masters ever degrade, or are they permenamt? I assume that would depend on the condition in which they’re kept, and of course, the amount of fire they’re subjected to. But is there some finite amount of time until they’re gone either way?
It depends on the type of master. For example, back in the 20s and 30s, mastering comprised of etching the live sound onto a disc, usually made of wax, from which you’d make metal discs for pressing shellac or vinyl. These discs are essentially inert and could last forever.Subsequently media was recorded to magnetic tape, which is far less archivally sound, because the adhesive that binds the magnetic material to the tape material degrades, and the media literally flakes off. If stored in a proper environment it can last decades but you still want to periodically examine the material and make copies, digitally or optically onto film, in the case of soundtracks.The great loss here is there was a lot of material that wasn’t digitized or even properly cataloged, because they were session masters or live performances. We might never know what was lost in that fire, because the studio never bothered to properly document what it had.
They’re magnetic tapes, and they do indeed degrade. Slower at proper climate control and storage.
Yeah, I worked at a fairly small record label, but there was one thing they didn’t mess around with: all recordings had to go into the safe, and backups had to go to Iron Mountain. That costs money, but not THAT much money.A related story that makes me cringe as a person who likes musical instruments is the flood of SoundCheck in Nashville — why was the off-site storage place not out of the flood plane?!? https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2010/05/lost-in-the-nashville-flood-musical-instruments-galore-1.html
And that’s why they’ve been trying to bury the story. They know they are going to get sued. I’m assuming not just for “oh gawd you guys were idiots” but also “It says in my contract you will do X to protect me and you didn’t”.
Very, very true. And the value of those lost masters is incredible. I couldn’t even guess what the insurance value on master of Nevermind would be.
In the article they attribute the mismanagement to the parent company being sold several times and none of the new owners moving the material off of the lot.I’m still somewhat appalled—I’ve worked in television my entire career and even forthe garbage we’ve produced we bus the masters off-site to a dedicated facility.
On the plus side, these masters we’re unable to recover have been gone for 11 years and we only just now noticed, so…
There also hasn’t really been a notable new format in that time. (I guess Mp4, maybe?) It will be noticeable the next time there’s a really major new format and an upgrade of all that material is impossible on it. There’s also presumably plenty of stuff that was lost that was never issued, or hasn’t been issued since the days of LPs or cassette tapes, and now can never be released in a better format.
Yeah, I was mostly just being dumb. And it truly is a shame. I have thought about this a bit, with regards to getting blu-rays of films that I watched in my youth. To a certain extent, the version that’s burned into my memory is the (relatively) crappy VHS tape I watched over and over. So…really, anything will just be an improvement over that. We’ve lost potential new clarity of this old music on a new medium, but we still have the versions that we fell in love with. It’s a loss, but it’s not as though the music no longer exists like with the countless films that have rotted or been lost or simply never transferred to digital. But yeah, for things that were never issued…*poof* they continue to not exist.
I mean, I think part of the concern is that as new formats come along a lot of old stuff gets swept away, or never properly upgraded. To mention those old fuzzy VHS tapes – have you tried playing one of them lately? It isn’t just that they look worse than newer formats we’re accustomed to, but also that they actually look genuinely worse than they used to (even discounting degradation of the tapes) on newer TVs, which they aren’t optimized for. I still have some tapes, and older video games, and I find myself clinging to an old CRT TV in my closet just because once that’s gone, I won’t be able to play any of that old media on a format they’re actually optimized for anymore. And it’s not like everything has made it to Blu Ray either. A whole ton of films have only ever been released on VHS, and will simply continue to look worse and worse as technology moves on. Now consider that the works of Billie Holiday, or John Coltrane, or Nirvana’s Nevermind, can never again be truly upgraded or optimized for a new format. And then also consider that at some point some new technology is going to come along that the existing copies just can’t be upgraded for, maybe not even to match the current listening experience as it stands. It’s a huge loss, bigger than I think is easy for us laymen about this sort of thing to truly understand or appreciate. Even Blu Ray remasters are only really possible given access to original elements that can actually be upgraded in that way; otherwise you’re just ripping that ratty old VHS to a new disc without any improvement.
Whatever the next big innovation in music playback is,
people will want to hear their old favorites in that new format, and you
can’t do that without the masters – well-archived, protected, labeled,
and documented masters. Keeping Nirvana’s masters protected seems like a
no-brainer in that context – not to mention all the other artists whose
work they were housing – and somehow they failed to do even that. The
most obvious way to turn their catalog into future money, and they
screwed it up.But that’s nothing compared to the real
crime: they tasked themselves with guarding the legacy of the 20th
century, and they half-assed it.
Nah, they’ll dig up some fairly high-quality dupe of the masters and work from that and the vast majority of people won’t be able to tell any difference after years and years of listening to highly compressed digital audio files and streaming music. All except for the audiophiles who will loudly proclaim that they can indeed hear the difference.
I think the bigger loss, by the sounds of it, are the outtakes and early takes that didn’t make it to the final album. Because by the sounds of it these masters would’ve been all the studio work they recorded for Nevermind- so everything off the final album will be digitised and available in some form. But all the stuff that wasn’t digitised and released, that’s now completely lost.And as someone who loves it when bands release material that helps us hear how a record develops, and radically different takes of famous songs, that to me is a huge loss.
Right. Just look at what Metallica, The Beatles and Bob Dylan have done in recent years with full box set reissues of various albums. Demos, alt takes, contemporary live recordings…
I remember, even in the 90s, some CD reissues of previously vinyl-only albums/songs had to resort to making a digital copy directly from the vinyl record itself, since the masters were lost.
Listen, I love Nirvana, but fucking hell- keeping EVERYTHING CHESS RECORDS EVER RECORDED seems awful important, too. And, you know, Louis Armstrong is probably the single greatest genius of 20th century music. This entire thing is like a nightmare. (I know you realize this, but I’ve seen lots of articles focusing on Nirvana, when we’re talking about something that devastated a large chunk of our popular culture over the last 80 or so years. It’s ungodly.)
Yeah, I only used that as an example of one of the acts you’d think they’d try to preserve even if only for monetary reasons. The whole thing is awful.
So what you’re saying is, these missing records are so hard to find? Oh well, whatever. Nevermind.
Asia’s masters?!? NOT ASIA!!!
Asia was extremely influential. They were the second most influential band named after a continent in the history of music. Do not slander them.
“They’re gonna be the next Beatles!!!”—a surprisingly large number of people back in 1982
Which is the most influential? America or Europe?
Oceania would be my guess. You’ve never heard “My Way” until you heard it accompanied by an orchestra consisting of only didgeridoos.
Well, clearly it’s whichever basement rich kid band made the best version of PANGAEA.
Which is the most influential? America or Europe?Neither- it was famed progressive jazz/rock band Pangea.
I’m glad someone recognizes the achievements of my late, lamented midwest thrash-prov band South America.
“prov”?
As in improv. Know your sub-sub-sub-genres.
Yeah, it’s like the jazz of comedy…
And neither of them were as influential as the SONG named after a continent.
Don’t worry. I have a near perfect copy of Heat of the Moment.
Damn right. Europe being the most influential, naturally.
Hey! Owner of a Lonely Heart is a good song! And it isn’t by Asia, but my point stands!
I really didn’t appreciate the impact of the Buggles until I watched Todd in the Shadow’s “One-Hit Wonderland” episode on them. Hard to believe they joined Yes together and then separately co-founded Asia and became an uber-producer.
I would argue that “Owner Of A Broken Heart” is much better, but my opinion is probably unpopular.
Uh, hey, you’ve been a roundabout.
I’ve been a lot of things.
The masters were lost in the heat of the moment.
Ghenghis Kahn, Chairman Mao, and Vladimir Putin?
Talk about the heat of the moment.
This is terrible news for lots of reasons. One reason it saddens me is that I like collecting the reissues put out by Mobile Fidelity Labs and other specialty labels, many of which are the best-sounding copies you can purchase. These reissues (or the ones that sound good, anyway) rely on the master tapes.
Do you really need the quality of a reissue from the master if you’re just going to listen to it on a lossy streamed mp3 anyway? What do you bet that was what UMG was banking on for the first few years until it got easier and easier to download higher quality tracks?
I don’t see the problem. If they lost all of Nirvana’s master tapes, just call them back in to re-record them.
It’s not like Gavin Rosedale has been doing anything lately.
That’s impossible! Dave Grohl is with the Foo Fighters now, how can they get him back to record for Nirvana?!???
Butch Vig also needs rotator cuff surgery, which will probably keep him out of the studio for a little while.
Don’t worry, I’ve got Nevermind on CD in decent condition, and will allow Universal to burn a copy for the low price of $1 million.
I’ve got a copy that I’ll sell for $999,999.99
Curses! Foiled by the free market again! That’s it, I vote for socialism.
Teenage angst is gonna pay off well!
That song was on In Utero, not Nevermind.
Everything’s my fault, I take all the blame.
You have to have the copy with the hidden song.
People go on about Kurt, but holy shit, Kris Novoselic was so good looking back in the day, not that young Dave Grohl wasn’t easy on the eyes too. Jesus, the three of them on stage must have been so sploosh inducing for many a young punk rock girl nihilist back then.
You had me at sploosh inducing!!
Out of curiosity, I looked up his Wikipedia entry…he’s 54 now. Whoah, I feel old now.
rawr
Forgive my ignorance, but just out of curiosity: With current technology (or plausible technological advancement for the foreseeable future) is it possible to digitally enhance* a copy of an original recording in such a way as to produce a reasonable simulation of the original master?* With the utmost respect for the original sound (no autotuning allowed!)
People should really really read that NYT article. It’s quite long, but deeply engaging and fascinating on many levels. It is also quite stunning when they list two straight *really* long paragraphs of popular musicians from the 1930’s to 2008 that were in that warehouse. UMG’s catalog is gargantuan.
This might explain why nobody can find the original Asia album masters. So you could say they were lost in the heat of the moment?Huh? Huh? Get it? I made a funny.
arent all these albums on spotify? wgaf
Clearly, the fear of total Armageddon has moved some unseen group to stage these kinds of total losses of art so they can store them in the underground vaults before the world ends.