Universal Music Group disputes New York Times' claim that 500,000 master recordings were lost in 2008 fire
Aux Features Music
Today, The New York Times’ published a breathtaking story alleging that Universal Music Group lost roughly 500,000 master recordings by iconic artists in the 2008 fire that scorched Universal Studios’ Hollywood lot. At the time, UMG downplayed the damage done, having told Deadline that there “was little lost from UMG’s vault.” Drawing upon legal documents and internal records, as well as Randy Aronson, a former UMG employee, the Times pokes holes in their public statements, declaring that this was “the biggest disaster in the history of the music business.”
Now, UMG has disputed the Times’ reporting, saying in a statement that the article contains “numerous inaccuracies, misleading statements, contradictions and fundamental misunderstandings of the scope of the incident and affected assets.”
“While there are constraints preventing us from publicly addressing some of the details of the fire that occurred at NBCUniversal Studios facility more than a decade ago, the incident—while deeply unfortunate—never affected the availability of the commercially released music nor impacted artists’ compensation,” it reads.
It goes on to note “the tens of thousands of back catalog recordings that we have already issued in recent years—including master-quality, high-resolution, audiophile versions of many recordings that the story claims were ‘destroyed.’” It doesn’t, however, dispute that damage was done to archives, and a source tells Variety that UMG representatives “were not entirely up-front about the extent of the damage” at the time.
Per the Times, the loss impacted the archives of labels like Decca, Chess, Impulse, MCA, ABC, A&M, Geffen and Interscope, all of which had been acquired or had partnered with UMG over the years. That damage can be viewed in full here, but, per the Times, here’s a selection of what was lost.
Among the incinerated Decca masters were recordings by titanic figures in American music: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland. The tape masters for Billie Holiday’s Decca catalog were most likely lost in total. The Decca masters also included recordings by such greats as Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five and Patsy Cline.
The fire most likely claimed most of Chuck Berry’s Chess masters and multitrack masters, a body of work that constitutes Berry’s greatest recordings. The destroyed Chess masters encompassed nearly everything else recorded for the label and its subsidiaries, including most of the Chess output of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Bo Diddley, Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and Little Walter. Also very likely lost were master tapes of the first commercially released material by Aretha Franklin, recorded when she was a young teenager performing in the church services of her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, who made dozens of albums for Chess and its sublabels.
Virtually all of Buddy Holly’s masters were lost in the fire. Most of John Coltrane’s Impulse masters were lost, as were masters for treasured Impulse releases by Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and other jazz greats. Also apparently destroyed were the masters for dozens of canonical hit singles, including Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats’ “Rocket 88,” Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley/I’m A Man,” Etta James’s “At Last,” the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” and the Impressions’ “People Get Ready.”
The list of destroyed single and album masters takes in titles by dozens of legendary artists, a genre-spanning who’s who of 20th- and 21st-century popular music. It includes recordings by Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, the Andrews Sisters, the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, Lionel Hampton, Ray Charles, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Clara Ward, Sammy Davis Jr., Les Paul, Fats Domino, Big Mama Thornton, Burl Ives, the Weavers, Kitty Wells, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Bobby (Blue) Bland, B.B. King, Ike Turner, the Four Tops, Quincy Jones, Burt Bacharach, Joan Baez, Neil Diamond, Sonny and Cher, the Mamas and the Papas, Joni Mitchell, Captain Beefheart, Cat Stevens, the Carpenters, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Al Green, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Elton John, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Buffett, the Eagles, Don Henley, Aerosmith, Steely Dan, Iggy Pop, Rufus and Chaka Khan, Barry White, Patti LaBelle, Yoko Ono, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Police, Sting, George Strait, Steve Earle, R.E.M., Janet Jackson, Eric B. and Rakim, New Edition, Bobby Brown, Guns N’ Roses, Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige, Sonic Youth, No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, Snoop Dogg, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Hole, Beck, Sheryl Crow, Tupac Shakur, Eminem, 50 Cent and the Roots.
Anybody else sweating just thinking about it?
22 Comments
That list is…holy fuck that’s bad.
man, its horrible that in 2008, they wouldn’t have made digital versions of the masters for remastering of those yet… Oh, wait. They did.
That’s addressed in the article: A large portion of that vault wasn’t fully digitized. There’s unreleased music in those vaults that will now never see the light of day, and older records that haven’t been reissued in decades because UMG didn’t think they were marketable.While the fires haven’t wiped out Buddy Holly and John Coltrane’s music from existence entirely (for ex), it does mean that future attempts to reissue/remaster the music will be working off of COPIES, not the original recordings. Which means that any flaws in those copies or degraded audio quality will become the new standard for that work. Digital archives are a good thing, but so is having physical, analog originals to work off of in the first place.
Unfortunately, it was not profitable to digitize these recordings and UMG was too greedy to allow these recordings to be released for free.
Reading is hard, but worth it. I know the attempts at snarkiness can sometimes get in the way of this effort, but I think you’ll find that your snark game improves dramatically when you know what the fuck you’re talking about. Keep trying!
I heard they were just trying to burn the Yoko Ono stuff and the whole thing got out of hand
I had always heard that most music labels, movie studios, etc stored their master recordings in a bunch of secure sites in some former salt mines in Kansas or something.
Not Bobby Brown! Anyone, but Bobby Brown!
I just love that the automatic answer from these corporations is to deny, but to be very unspecific about the denial. “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” followed by “I’d tell you why you’re wrong, but there are reasons I can’t and I can’t tell you those reasons but trust me you’re wrong” is such a placating way to cover up the actual damage done. It automatically makes me think that the NYT article is absolutely accurate
Oh yeah, it’s ass-covering nonsense. If anybody needs more proof that NYT’s coverage is accurate- there’s already artists coming out on Twitter and elsewhere to reveal that their masters went up in smoke.
Hole: https://pitchfork.com/news/hole-say-they-were-never-told-about-lost-recordings-in-warehouse-fire/?utm_source=twitter&utm_brand=p4k&utm_social-type=owned&utm_medium=social&mbid=social_twitter
The Roots:
“It’s absolutely full of mistruths, we lost 499,998 recordings!”
I knew I shouldn’t have read this article.
Universal then went on to add that the New York Times did not see radioactive graphite on the ground, because the studio’s reactor most certainly did not explode.
Come on, guys. The NYT did not claim 500k masters were lost, they claimed 175k were, which would account for 500k song titles (multiple songs on a master). This is sourced directly from UMG documents Rosen got his hands on. Per your headline, UMG would be right to dispute that 500k figure for masters, but that’s not what the NYT said, don’t help them confuse the issue. Relevant graf:“The scope of this calamity is laid out in litigation and company documents, thousands of pages of depositions and internal UMG files that I obtained while researching this article. UMG’s accounting of its losses, detailed in a March 2009 document marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” put the number of “assets destroyed” at 118,230. Randy Aronson considers that estimate low: The real number, he surmises, was “in the 175,000 range.” If you extrapolate from either figure, tallying songs on album and singles masters, the number of destroyed recordings stretches into the hundreds of thousands. In another confidential report, issued later in 2009, UMG asserted that “an estimated 500K song titles” were lost.”
Ooh, you really nailed ‘em by pointing out that approximately 500,000 songs were lost in the destruction of those master recordings.
The list of destroyed single and album masters […] includes […] Guns N’ RosesWell at least some good came out of all this tragedy…
Several movie studios, including 20th Century Fox, stored all their master prints in a vault in a salt mine in Kansas. When checking on them, they discovered that some of those prints had been damaged, the vault set up had let a type of film decay take a heavy toll on those master prints. In particular, the master print to Star Wars had suffered severe color damage after only 15 years (this did not happen to its then two sequels because those films were owned by producer George Lucas who put them in a different kind of film vault), the restoration of that master print led to the Star Wars Special Edition project, which we all know how that turned out. AND STILL THEY KEPT THEIR MASTER RECORDINGS BETTER THAN GODDAMNED UNIVERSAL WHO JUST LEFT ‘EM IN AN EASILY-DESTROYED BUILDING ON A REGULARLY IN-FLAMES BUSY MOVIE STUDIO ON THE SIDE OF A REGULARLY IN-FLAMES HILLSIDE IN NORTH HOLLYWOOD!!!!
Damn, that is rough. I can’t even bring myself to make an unnecessarily snide crack about Yoko Ono’s work being included in that list.
The most tragic part of this story is that Eminem’s master tapes were backed up digitally before the fire.
BUT WHAT ABOUT GERARDO
It doesn’t sound like UMG is actually denying the loss of the masters. They talk about how “the availability of the commercially released music” was unaffected, and that “master-quality, high-resolution, audiophile versions” still exist. That’s just saying that good quality copies exist of the actual finished albums. But note that some of the music the NYT is claiming was lost was outtakes and unreleased material.