This is such an upsetting story. To summarise: a storage facility for Universal burnt down in 2008. It turns out that something like 500,000 original masters of recordings by everyone from Louis Armstrong to 50 Cent were lost. …
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Universal covered it up so well, the story only emerged a few days ago. Not even people in the know seem to have realised how great the losses were until now.
The bass player of Nirvana reckons their masters have gone, R.E.M. are looking into it, lawsuits loom…
It’s a story that seems to have had little coverage in the UK but boy has it hit me.
The music is all in the cloud, but the source of that music is big clunky physical stuff that needs looking after. It’s a big problem, and covering it up doesn’t help.
And of course the UK hasn’t been immune to losses of master tapes by neglect or cavalier treatment.
Time for a National Archive of recorded music?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html
grac says
Thank you for posting that. Heartbreaking reading indeed.
Arthur Cowslip says
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Tragedy aside, that’s a magnificent and well-written article. It expertly moves from consideration of a specific incident (the accidental burning of the UMG vault) to pondering about the larger question (archiving and preservation of art and music).
It even second-guessed what was going to be my own cynical response here (simply for the sake of argument of course) and expressed it more clearly than I ever could: “A skeptic might argue that this is as it should be…. If the sole vestiges of thousands of old recordings are a few stray 45s lining the shelves of collectors — perhaps that’s not a cultural tragedy, perhaps that’s a commercial-art ecosystem functioning properly.”
Overall, it’s an issue worth pondering and serious debate. I would say that passionate music archivists have an uphill struggle on their hands, however. How much of the general population care about this stuff, let alone understand the issues? I’d say less than 0.1%, really. “You’ve got your records, granddad, why do you need anything else?”
The forward-looking, devil-may-care part of me thinks maybe this is a blessing in disguise. Maybe the archiving of master recordings is just too expensive, too cumbersome, too problematic and of such minimal impact to people in general that it genuinely is not worth the effort. It may mean that music nerds like us Afterworders will never get a complete Buddy Holly Masters box set or interactive Steely Dan multi-tracks, but historical revisionism and completism of that nature (you might say) distracts from the true nature of the rock and pop industry. The “true nature” being the records pressed and sold in shops, little 12 inch platters of vinyl which will accumulate dust and scratches over the years but which generally will outlive us all. You might say the “true nature” of Chuck Berry is not a multi-track master session with pristine sound quality but a genuine jukebox ’45 in a slowly eroding paper sleeve – a little time nugget, compressed into a mono track carved into black vinyl, exactly how people in the fifties would have experienced it.
Maybe the potential availability of this stuff is what drives an unnatural desire to treat it as more important than it actually is. To take an example I personally care about, a few years ago the multi-track masters of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells were made available online as part of a remix competition. Most people wouldn’t really care, but I was overjoyed and I pored over them with great intensity, listening closely to how all the little individual instruments took their place in the overall jigsaw, using a free software application called Audacity to pan and fade different parts in real time. But I soon got bored, and eventually I lost the files. I THOUGHT I cared, but the more I think about it the more I realise that the true art of Tubular Bells is that mixed, mastered, pressed copy I have on vinyl. There’s some rare alchemy in that publicly distributed version that no amount of remixes or multi-track masters will recapture. And if you had told me the original master of Tubular Bells was destroyed in the seventies I don’t think I would really have cared – it’s the potential availability of it that drives the kind unhealthy completest streak that rarely satisfies in the end.
To take another example, I recently acquired online (shh) the complete Twickenham sound stage recordings of the Beatles’ January 1969 rehearsal sessions. DAYS of jamming and conversations by the best band on the planet in self-destruct mode. Joy! …. Then I got bored when I got to the end of the third day. Again, the “holy grail” feeling that covets such things far outweighs the actual use of it.
Och, I don’t really know how I feel about all this. I’m trying not to troll, but I’m just talking off the top of my head! But I do think the “devil’s advocate” argument is one worth having.
To widen the debate, it’s worth considering that paintings (to pick another art form) don’t last forever. I don’t remember where I saw it, but the Da Vinci Last Supper painting was on some TV show or something recently, and they were talking about how much of a job it is to preserve it. And there’s not much left to preserve – it’s crumbling away and there’s not a whole lot left of the original work of art as it was intended. I remember thinking, why bother? Are we losing sight of our future by fixating so much on elements of the past that we are afraid to let go of? If, say, the Louvre went up in flames and the whole collection was lost, it would be tragic but we would move on, wouldn’t we?
bogl says
These are all good questions. Conserving this stuff is expensive and hard. Is it ultimately worthwhile?
I think so.
Another perspective on all this from Andy Zax ,a producer who has worked on the Woodstock box set. He wrote this a few years ago, and he only refers to the Universal fire as having lost a small label’s output.
http://www.andyzax.com/goodbye
fatima Xberg says
A great article.
Actually, he’s saying this about the Universal fire: “In historic terms, the magnitude of the loss from the Universal fire was incalculable. There are now thousands of albums and singles–the complete discographies of entire record labels–for which we now–and forever–have no better sources than safety copies, clean vinyl, and whatever managed to get released on CD. “
Arthur Cowslip says
Yes I agree, another great article. Call me naive, but even as a music lover I had genuinely never thought deeply about this kind of stuff before now. The bit that resonates for me is in the last paragraph:
“I believe that great music will endure no matter how shitty it sounds, but just as we associate the 1920s with crackly 78s on hand-cranked victrolas, I would hate for people in 100 years to associate our present era with lossy digital files played through cheap white earbuds. It doesn’t need to. It shouldn’t have to.”
fatima Xberg says
I was at the sound archive of the Ethnology Museum in Berlin once for a demonstration of different “sound carriers”. They played 100 year-old Edison cylinders (without electricity: on a wind-up player) and broken and scratched shellac discs. But they could only play a Todd Rundgren CD-rom on a twenty year old Mac, running on the original software without the regular Quicktime updates.
Junior Wells says
great anecdote Fatima.
bogl says
Quite right Fatima – I meant to say that Zax knew that entire labels’-worth had been lost, but not the full extent of the damage as revealed in the NYT article. What was known then was bad enough.
dai says
How would law suits work? The record company owns the masters in most cases, if the artists do then they would need to arrange their own storage?
Mike_H says
There are a lot of old recordings that are now owned by the artists themselves, having been given back in lieu of outstanding royalties or sold back to the artists by the labels. There are also recordings that have been sold on by labels to other companies. Then there are the recordings which have merely been leased by the artists to labels, for a fixed term, or only licensed to a label until another label offers a better deal.
Possible suits for negligence and even prosecutions for fraud.
It’s even possible that some recordings were merely entrusted to Universal for “safe” storage and never were their property.
bogl says
One aspect (as I understand it from what I have heard, I am not a lawyer) is that under US copyright law masters can revert to the original artist after 35 years. There seems to be some evidence that artists have enquired about this and not got a very satisfactory response. Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell have been mentioned. Someone with more legal nous may wish to peruse http://futureofmusic.org/article/fact-sheet/right-terminate-musicians%E2%80%99-guide-copyright-reversion
If there is no master to give back to the artist, then what? A lawsuit, I guess.
Mike_H says
I imagine the current trend of releasing archival box-sets is what has exposed the true extent of the damage done.
Imagine securing the services of Steven Wilson to remaster your back catalogue from scratch and then discovering there are no tapes left for him to work on.
fatima Xberg says
That has already happened. Mr. Wilson was to remaster the early Tangerine Dream catalog (including the usual surround mixes), but it turned out only two albums had the required master tapes available. The search eventually brought up a lot of outtakes though.
Bargepole says
Similarly, plans for a SW deluxe version of Going For The One by Yes had to be scrapped when it was realised the tapes were lost.
fentonsteve says
God, what a depressing read for lovers of master tapes.
And headline figure: only 18% of recordings available on streaming services.
Tony Japanese says
Does this mean only 18% of commercially released (in a physcial format) music is available on streaming services, or does the other 82% of recordings include multitudes of takes/false starts for every song you can think of?
fentonsteve says
I think the former.
I’ve never believed the “everything is online now” statement, I only have a few thousand physical releases of the past few decades and I know plenty of those are not.
The Good Doctor says
It never ceases to amaze me how poorly safeguarded master tapes are – and the tell tale signs are when you play a CD with a ‘remastered’ track which has the crackle and surface noise from being mastered from the best Vinyl copy available rather than the original tapes. Those who chuckle at us with our archaic CD and Record Collections and bray on about streaming everything should take note – your access to the music you love is out of your control.
It’s far worse for video footage. Among the great myths of this age – everything is on YouTube forever – absolutely not true – YT have been vigorously taking down anything with copyright control for some time now (the process can be automated by detecting the footprint of music the poster doesn’t own). Go try searching for a clip you once enjoyed 2-3 years ago and see if it’s still there. I wonder how much of that stuff was put there for ‘safe keeping’ and might be lost forever, or at least only exist on a VCR owned by one person.
On the plus side, those of us with crates full of “media” – there is a strong argument for hanging on to it especially some of the more obscure stuff. Sure – you can’t take it with you, but someone might thank you for not chucking that Drexciya CD or Crispy Ambulance 7″ into landfill someday.
bogl says
And let’s not forget that most of what was destroyed in that fire was TV and film stock, about which we know even less than the music masters. The journalist who wrote the original piece has suggested someone find out more about that story.
In a time when physical media is bought and owned less, it becomes ever more important someone looks after it (casts eye round piles of vinyl, CDs, DVDs and books around room).
minibreakfast says
There’s a brand new Twitter account dedicated to the music supposedly lost in the Universal fire:
https://mobile.twitter.com/extinctophonics
JQW says
Unfortunately all of those Twitter posts have since been removed, I presume due to legal reasons.
ishmethit says
For me, the closing section about the long-forgotten work of Don Bennett is the killer argument here – what have we lost? We’ll never know now (if indeed we were ever going to).
Odd coincidence that UMG are suddenly really concerned about this now after ten years of cover-up and dissembling, just as the lawyers start revving up:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/jun/19/universal-music-group-we-owe-artists-transparency-over-master-tapes-fire-lucian-grainge
You say ‘transparency’, I kinda think you mean the other thing.
Mike_H says
Transparency now that they’ve been caught.
Obfuscation all the way before that.