500,000 irreplaceable master recordings destroyed

[skankdelvar]

Just saw this on Rick Beato's channel. 

Seems that 11 years ago there was a fire in a storage building at Universal Studios in Los Angeles. What Universal never disclosed at the time was that nearly half a million archived master recordings were lost in the fire. According to Beato these included performances by the following and in some cases all their recorded work:

Quote

Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald and Judy Garland; as well as some of Chuck Berry’s greatest recordings, the masters of some of Aretha Franklin’s first appearances on record, almost of all of Buddy Holly’s masters and John Coltrane’s masters in the Impulse Records collection. Also lost were 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...

Apart from those artists above it may be the case that the entire catalogue of Chess Records masters has been lost , including performances by Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Howling Wolf and more.

To some, this might not seem too important given the wide availability of these artists' work in derivative formats. Not so. We are talking here about the physical manifestation of the original recordings; the MP3 on one's phone is to the master recording as a postcard of the Mona Lisa is to the original painting. In the event that new formats come along - as have CD's and MP3's - the original masters will no longer be available for conversion.

It has been speculated that Universal have kept quiet about this for 11 years because an inability to demonstrate their physical ownership of the masters would impact on licensing deals, etc, while also leading to litigation from the artists or their estates.

It might seem like a silly thing to worry about but I think this is just awful  

Check out Rick's vid for more info.

Edited June 23, 2019 by skankdelvar

[Jazzmaster62]

This is shocking to be honest and a complete scandal for not just Universal but the music industry itself. If the label had any sort of spine (doubtful), it would let the artists take ownership of the 'lost' masters from here on in. 

[skankdelvar]

2 minutes ago, Jazzmaster62 said:

If the label had any sort of spine (doubtful), it would let the artists take ownership of the 'lost' masters from here on in. 

Trouble is, one can't own something that's been destroyed and therefore doesn't exist. Which kind of goes to the nub of Universal's problem, particularly if these masters were counted as assets on the company's books. 

[Jazzmaster62]

But they will still be making money off 'owning' the master recording right?

[skankdelvar]

23 minutes ago, Jazzmaster62 said:

But they will still be making money off 'owning' the master recording right?

Ah, but will they? With this question burning in my mind I telephoned my close personal friend the New York music lawyer Mr Wolf J Flywheel. Our conversation proceeded as follows:

Me: Wolf? It's me, Skank ...

Flywheel: Whaddyawant ya Limey fag?

Me: About this Universal masters fire ...

Flywheel: Get the f*ck outta here! Ain't got time to talk, too busy filing a class action against those f*ckin' schlemiels

Me: Based on what?

Flywheel: Who cares? It's a bonanza. Now scram, shitbird, I got plaintiffs to depose

(Ends)

Edited June 23, 2019 by skankdelvar

[SpondonBassed]

I'm sure someone mentioned that on 6music recently.

It makes you wonder how often this sort of thing occurs.  I mean; lots of art was "lost" during WWII.  Not all of it was destroyed.  Yet no-one person is in a position to give a sound guess as to just how much was actually destroyed as opposed to declared destroyed or appropriated, archived and forgotten about.

This isn't a case of a lost archive however.  It is why original art is valued highly.  It's a surprisingly volatile commodity.

Edited June 23, 2019 by SpondonBassed

[Billy Apple]

You wonder that these early recordings might just disintegrate anyway?

Bad things happen to good things. I'm more concerned that Universal didn't just fess-up. But of course they wouldn't if there was a penny in it for them.

Anyway, we can record them all again with the latest X Factor winners. And play them 'live' from the new ice-rink on top of the Notre Dame. Be great for the kiddies.

 

[Jazzmaster62]

Would someone have converted the masters to digital files?

[skankdelvar]

9 minutes ago, Jazzmaster62 said:

Would someone have converted the masters to digital files?

Yes, but in a way that's like taking a digital picture of a painting. The other problem is that many of the original session recordings may have been lost over the years. Even if the sessions were available they could be re-mastered but the act of mastering contributes to the totality of the piece and how does one reproduce the decisions made by the mastering engineer?

OK, I'm going to stop now before I turn into the BBC's Arts Correspondent and uber-pseud Will Gompertz

Edited June 23, 2019 by skankdelvar

[mybass]

https://completemusicupdate.com/article/universal-master-tape-fire-revelations-could-result-in-litigation/

[fleabag]

22 minutes ago, Jazzmaster62 said:

Would someone have converted the masters to digital files?

Possibly, but would they have been able to record the stems, or just the track as a whole ?

An mp3 of a master is just an mp3.  There's no stems to  speak of so no re-mastering can be done

[Billy Apple]

3 minutes ago, fleabag said:

Possibly, but would they have been able to record the stems, or just the track as a whole ?

An mp3 of a master is just an mp3.  There's no stems to  speak of so no re-mastering can be done

Why would you want to remaster? Surely the joy is how it was captured at the time?

[fleabag]

You're speaking for yourself, but cant speak for others.  Who knows what someone else might want to do with them. Without the stems, there's zero options

[Billy Apple]

4 minutes ago, fleabag said:

You're speaking for yourself, but cant speak for others.  Who knows what someone else might want to do with them. Without the stems, there's zero options

None of us can speak for others. But many recordings beauty lies on the moment.

You only have to look at star wars to see what happens when things are revisited.

Mind you, I've always thought everything I've ever committed to tape could have the bass a bit louder

[NancyJohnson]

Fire or flood? There was allegedly a catastrophic loss this side of the pond about 20 years ago when the Thames arrived unannounced at the Virgin Vault.  This wasn't limited to Virgin artistes, but nobody is getting all tearful about the loss of original recordings from Japan or XTC.

Personally, I don't really feel any loss unless there was content languishing there that didn't see release, yes harsh, eh?  You would like to think that everything had been digitised years beforehand, so it's not like total loss.   

[fleabag]

54 minutes ago, Billy Apple said:

None of us can speak for others. But many recordings beauty lies on the moment.

Mind you, I've always thought everything I've ever committed to tape could have the bass a bit louder

Many artists have re-mastered their own work, for their own personal taste i presume,  so i still think you're speaking for yourself when you say the beauty lies in the original.  It surely depends on the individual and the owners of the music

[Billy Apple]

6 hours ago, fleabag said:

you're speaking for yourself

You keep repeating yourself. You’re speaking for yourself.

What’s your  point?

[SpondonBassed]

6 hours ago, NancyJohnson said:

nobody is getting all tearful about the loss of original recordings from Japan or XTC.

That's probably because the news didn't hit the media with such a splash.

Now that you've told me, I am a little tearful.  I was a little young to "get" XTC the first time around but I always liked them.  As an adult I am exploring their back catalogue a bit and it brings me great joy.  They're a little intellectual for pop but I'll allow that.

It makes me think how later generations will miss out on some of their less popular but better-for-it material As they listen to music formats that have yet to be invented but that have not included XTC in their catalogues.

I can appreciate you taking the hard line though.  In a way, it's a bit like natural selection in nature.  The evolution of music has many influences.  The loss of master recordings being one.

[SpondonBassed]

6 hours ago, fleabag said:

Many artists have re-mastered their own work, for their own personal taste i presume,  so i still think you're speaking for yourself when you say the beauty lies in the original.  It surely depends on the individual and the owners of the music

...and me.

I listen to different recordings of the same material by the same bands and I have favourites.  Sometimes I dislike a particular version.  Other times a version stands head and shoulders above the others for no reason other than the convergence of all of the right elements in the same space and time.

Like many others, I can not define what it is that grabs me about the performances I like most.  Sometimes it's the ambience of a live recording combined with the raw adrenaline coming through from the musicians involved.  Other times it is the clever overdubbing and layering of pre-recorded pieces to make something extraordinary.

The loss of stems probably matters more with recordings that are heavily worked in the studio.  In those cases, the magic does not come from spontaneity as much as from the crafting of a piece off-line, as it were.  In those cases, I agree with you.

Edited June 24, 2019 by SpondonBassed

[NancyJohnson]

1 hour ago, SpondonBassed said:

I was a little young to "get" XTC the first time around (etc.)...

I went through a massive XTC phase a couple of years back and it amazes me to this day that, singles aside, I didn't connect with them first time around.  I was drawn to them more recently because of the recent reissues that were overseen by Steven Wilson and Andy Partridge (which leads nicely onto the masters...).

I'd read an article detailing Wilson's work and he pretty much said that the label's attitude towards the masters was ambivalence...they'd deteriorated to such an extent that they were unusable, so Wilson went back to digital multitracks; at this juncture we really need to get past this nonsense about future mastering technology (sorry Skank) being able to pull more content from tapes that would be 40+ years old or getting melancholic about these artefacts simply being lost. 

I'm not wholly aware of the format the original audio would have been captured in back in the day, but listening back to the box-set of XTCs 1979 album Drums and Wires does make you question why there is any need to retain the original masters at all.  

Sadly, well with XTC at least - and this applies to other bands too - there's also the case that mastertapes are also lost by other means than fire or flood; they're just lost.  Reels of tapes in unmarked boxes in dusty record company basements.

[HazBeen]

F-in disgusting, also saw the vid. What gets me are the relative blasé reactions and statements by Universal I have been finding when I started looking into it a bit more.

Edited June 24, 2019 by HazBeen

[NikNik]

11 hours ago, mybass said:

https://completemusicupdate.com/article/universal-master-tape-fire-revelations-could-result-in-litigation/

Good!

[BigRedX]

Stems?

Most recordings made before the mid-60s would have been live direct to mono so there wouldn't be any stems.

I have several problems with the supposed loss of masters and multi-track tapes.

1. No matter how good an analogue tape recording is, it will never be as good as a high resolution digital recording. Analogue tape simply doesn't have the dynamic range or signal to noise ratio of a good digital recording. Any digital masters should have identical safety copies stored elsewhere.

2. There's a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth at the loss of unreleased recordings by various artists. IME, from hearing re-issue albums with "bonus" tracks on them, these recordings were unreleased at the time because they simply weren't as good as the music that was released, and maybe it is best that they stay that way.

3. I'm very much a believer in keeping the recordings the way they were from when they were originally released. By all means re-master them for any new delivery formats, as the whole point of mastering is to optimise the recording for the strengths and weaknesses of each individual delivery format - be it vinyl, cassette tape, CD, various compressed digital formats. Each should have its own mastered recording which should only be used for that particular format. However it is also my experience that for small volume vinyl releases the "mastered" version is produced at the cutting stage, which reduces the number of tape generations a recording goes through in order to preserve the dynamic range and signal to noise ratio.

3. None of the music that has been released has actually been lost. Some restoration work might be necessary for those recordings that now only exist on vinyl pressings, but the music is still there to be heard and salvaged. A good restoration engineer can work wonders with less than optimum source material to the point where it should be impossible to tell that any restoration work has been carried out.

[mybass]

The latest today:

$100 million lawsuit filed over Universal's 2008 warehouse fire
As expected, a lawsuit has been filed following recent revelations in the New York Times about the scale of a fire at an LA warehouse storing Universal Music owned master tapes all the way back in 2008. A legal filing made last week, which seeks class action status, says that the major breached its artist contracts by failing to keep the master tapes safe and then failing to inform said artists about the damage caused by the fire. 

Citing internal Universal Music memos, the NYT article alleged that up to half a million master tapes containing recordings from the 1930s through to the 2000s were lost in the 2008 fire at the Universal Studios Hollywood. This contradicts statements made at the time of the blaze when the record company played down the extent of the losses. 

The major has denied many of the claims in the NYT report. However, Universal Music chief Lucian Grainge said in a memo to staff last week that the company now had a duty to be super transparent with affected artists. 

While insisting that lots of speculation that has followed the publication of the NYT article is without substance, Grainge wrote: "We owe our artists transparency. We owe them answers. I will ensure that the senior management of this company, starting with me, owns this".

However, the artists participating in the new litigation - who include Soundgarden, Hole, Steve Earle, and the estates of Tom Petty and Tupac - want more than answers. The lawsuit is seeking compensatory damages "in excess of $100 million", arguing that Universal failed in its obligation to keep the master tapes containing its artists' recordings safe, and then instigated a cover-up which, the legal filing adds, basically continues to this day. 

The lawsuit also notes that, while in public Universal played down the significance of the 2008 fire at the time, that didn't stop it from suing the Universal film company over the blaze and making a significant insurance claim in relation to its losses. 

Law360 reports that, in Universal Music's largely sealed lawsuit against the other Universal company shortly after the fire, the former accused the latter of failing to keep sprinkler systems properly up to speed at the Hollywood site where the music company still stored its tapes. It also said that the Universal studio business had ignored safety recommendations made after an earlier fire in 1990. 

But the music major itself should have been ensuring safety measures were up to scratch at the facility, the artists' lawsuit argues. Not least because when the 1990 fire occurred, Universal Music and Universal Studios were still parts of the same company, so the former would have had access to the safety recommendations that were made. Moreover, the legal filing goes on, "at a minimum, these alleged dire [safety] conditions were observable to UMG on even the most cursory inspection of the warehouse and its location". 

As for the way Universal Music communicated the impact of the fire to its artists, the lawsuit lists various allegedly false statements the company's executives made to the press back in 2008, all of which played down the scale of the damage. 

And as for how the loss of the master tapes could in turn impact on the artists pursuing the litigation, the lawsuit adds: "Master recordings - the original sound recordings of songs - are the embodiment of a recording artist's life's work and musical legacy. They are the irreplaceable primary source of recorded music". 

Universal Music is yet to comment on the legal action. If it gets to court, there will be various questions to be asked. Firstly, exactly how many master tapes were actually lost? Then, how many recordings on those tapes don't exist elsewhere? Then, has the artist still suffered a loss even if their recordings are stored in another format? And, perhaps most importantly of all, what are Universal's contractual obligations to artists regarding tape storage?

 

[NancyJohnson]

1 hour ago, NikNik said:

Good!

Could and might.  I hear these fear-mongering words too often when there's some doubt in a possible future outcome.  We could go to war.  We might pay more for oranges post-Brexit.  It's all supposition.

This was the bit that alarmed me: The Prominent entertainment lawyer Howard King told the LA Times last week: “We have many very concerned clients. This has a potentially huge impact on their future, coupled with the rather disturbing fact that no one ever told them that their intellectual property may have been destroyed. There is a significant amount of discussion going on, and there will be formal action taken”.  All I see from this comment is lawyers sniffing around Universal for a payday like vultures circling over the rotting corpse of a long dead antelope; this all happened more than ten years ago and nobody has leaked any information about this until now(ish)?  

If an artist signs to a label, surely(!) they get an advance and if they're lucky they may make money off the back of record sales.  In the broadest sense, the label will put you up in a studio at their expense and whatever you record effectively becomes the label's property, master tapes and all.  Intellectual property is by definition intangible; tapes are tangible, the content thereon isn't. 

If it were me, I doubt I'd be getting my panties in a twist about some old masters being reduced to ash; I'd doubt any of the artistes actually touch the tape once they disembark the studio and the contents of the tape go off for mastering.  I'd wager most of the content was digitised many moons ago and most of the artistes quoted in the LA Times article are long dead anyhoo.  It's not like the loss of the originals is like a total loss, the music is still out there and really, would we mourn the fact that there wouldn't be any more Chuck Berry collections?