I doubt these tapes have any practical use anymore anyway. Magnetic tape has a shelf life, and most of these recordings are long past it. Certainly all of this music has been archived in a more stable format, and safety copies are made as a rule.
I doubt any professional would ever go back to the original tape to remix or remaster, they would start with the digital copies. If you don't believe me, Google "baking" magnetic tape, or restoring magnetic tape. These tapes wouldn't sound very good anymore.
IMO their only value would be historical or sentimental.
4
What ever happened to the motto that you don't ever put all your eggs in one basket ?
Why were such a big percentage of music original masters kept in one place. ? It is a tragedy to lose any of the original music but it would have been less of a tragedy if only a small percentage was lost in one fire
1
The day the music fried.
1
What a heart-breaking and sad story. Through sheer greed and willful neglect, UMG let the archives of America's one true, home-grown cultural heritage literally go up in smoke. Nice bunch of people that they are, they then lied to the public, the artists and their families/estates about the gravity and scale of the loss. As far as I am concerned, this is corporate malfeasance on a grand scale and UMG should be held accountable for their behaviour.
48
This article needs a detailed follow-up. Has there been any critical response to it? Have the affected artists reacted in any way? Are any lawsuits being planned? We need to know.
5
The fire is a moral lesson. Profit planning looks only to the future and prompts negligence, anxiety, ambition, lust, paranoia, and greed.
Love looks to the present. So both reality and freedom to move on are important.
And yes, Gratitude is inspired by preservation of history.
“Play it again, Sam.”
4
I am saddened to read the casual disregard music company managers had for these irreplaceable artifacts. I contrast the with the Grateful Dead whose storied vaults contain a trove of live and recorded music stretching back over decades. They’re now a vital component of the Dead’s music and a very profitable one to boot. The score is suits-n-ties 0; tie-dyed hippies 1.
7
June 1, 2008 The Day The Music Died (senryu/haiku quintet) "the day the music - really died, Universal - storage vault fire"; "like the musicians - who make it, music is not - imperishable"; "to an old warehouse - the flames leapt in destroying - master recordings"; "record companies - never cared about music - just about profit"; "RIP Berry, - Coltrane, Eagles, Ellington - and so many more"
1
Wow, and here I was thinking that the front page of the NYTimes was depressing, I’m in an absolute hole right now. Almost wish I didn’t read this and could still be ignorant on the subject. I’m going to get a drink.
10
“...who may simply see an expense on a balance sheet marked “Storage.” “
Expenses don’t appear on a balance sheet. They appear on the income statement.
3
I think that Joni Mitchell, a Canadian music icon, summed it up best:
"Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got till it's gone..."
Ah, them humans.
4
Fox News would never have an article like this. Thank you New York Times!
6
I'm very upset to learn of the magnanimous loss from the UMG fire in 2008. Here we are eleven years later just learning the truth about what was lost. Then again, I'm not surprised that preservation is a cost- benefit issue. Look what we've done to the planet in the name of progress, more aptly greed. The earth, the oceans, the atmosphere, the food chain, the rivers, our water supply, what a mess!
@Will What's greed got to do with it? AS it becomes widely known that the original masters produce sound quality far superior to any other source the originals become more valuable. Billions of dollars, or more, went up in smoke with the fire.
Decades ago more than half of the world's people lived in extreme poverty and starvation or near starvation . Now about 7% of the world lives in poverty thanks to the miracle of capitalism or as Elton John ,whose music I hate ,would say , times are changing now the poor get fat
2
@Commie The master recordings already had been getting more valuable for decades, as the commercial potential of reissuing music in various new, and sometimes higher-fidelity, consumer formats became steadily clearer even to businesspeople with only a weak knowledge of music and/or recording technology; but that still wasn't enough to motivate Universal to store those master recordings properly.
3
This is not only a sobering insight into a cultural disaster, but is also yet another reminder of the corporate ethos that dominates, not just the entertainment business, but all aspects of life in America: financial profit over social profit.
To the corporate mind the loss of recording masters is just collateral damage – possibly unfortunate, but more importantly it is a boost to short-term company profits. (Long-term? Not in the corporate dictionary of terms.) That’s all the stockholders, executives, and Boards of Directors care about. Saving on archival costs means a hefty bonus for a CEO.
Extrapolate that cavalier corporate attitude about art and apply it to human beings. Lower wages and fewer benefits produce human collateral damage that also creates greater corporate profits. With the destroyed recording archives we lose irreplaceable cultural capital; in the wider wage-benefits application we lose an archive of human capital. Corporations see no difference. Profit is profit.
Businessman Donald Trump knows this only too well. He would take information from a foreign government if it would profit him in an election. That’s how it works he says. Nothing else matters.
This is who we are and what we tolerate a thousand times a day. It’s the soul of America: the free-market, meaning corporations are free to do whatever they want. Competition, meritocracy, free-markets, companies are people and have free-speech rights.
The collective? A Coltrane riff? Meh.
8
Corporate, and profit issues aside, this is devastating for those of us who truly appreciate the art of music more do, the SOUND of music. Unfortunately many of the new generations listening to copies of copies of copies of copies of previous recordings would never understand what it's like to hear true audiophile quality recordings of these artists, and the fact is most would probably not even care nor notice. History lost forever, very heartbreaking
6
Corporations are designed to be profit engines. They are not incentivized to maintain our society’s cultural heritage. This music tragedy detailed (Decca!!!) is just gut-wrenching. Given how perishable music masters are, Intellectual Property law should be amended to reflect this reality (corporations own the property for 70 years after the artist is deceased before it enters public domain). All artists should have the finest quality master-copy that they maintain/store. The music industry needs to create something like RIAA licensing fees except they are archive fees that fund a preservation archive for original masters. After 20 (?) years the original master is owned by the artist or society and it’s continued preservation can be an artist or public social decision - not a company’s.
5
"Today Universal Music Group is a Goliath, by far the world’s biggest record company..."
Maybe this is another important argument against monopolies. If one individual or company owns all or most of anything then they are the custodian of too much for any one entity to reasonably take responsibility for, whether it is art, natural resources, media, bank assets, etc. No individual or corporation should be able to become so big that their failure abnormally threatens so much that is irreplaceable or affects so much culture or so many lives. Teddy Roosevelt lead the charge to bust trusts and monopolies in the 19th century. In the 20th century his cousin FDR finally put the stake in the heart of the Gilded Age. It's time to reverse the pervasive monopolization of many sectors of our economy, and end the destructive new Gilded Age that 4 decades of Democratic and Republican neoliberal policies have allowed to proliferate in a manner that is harmful to our democracy, our culture and the well being of our nation and its citizens.
11
One of the truly great magic tricks of the 20th century was tech to record performance art (it fuels to coffers of media empires and spurs new tech for consumer experience), and so, as I read this tragic and fascinating article, I can't help but feel betrayed by the money men that actually exert control on the original masters of film, TV, and music. They battle tooth and nail with lopsided contracts to demand full control over every aspect of a musician (or a film) but then treat the actual asset with disdain once the shackle put on and locked.
There's similar stories in Hollywood detailing the junking of original camera negatives to "make room" for real estate deals or to cut maintenance costs. The money men have no use for artistic legacy from the past as their eyes are glued on the next quarter's profits' report.
Digital versions are not ideal, the drives fail and the files get corrupted, and no one is going to know the fate of a drive until one tries to retrieve the "data" and can't. An audio compression is forever a concern, too. Iron Mountain is a joke for poorly organized music and film vaults, where gems, curios, and historical gap-filler reside. Too many stories of "rediscovered" material that sheds new light.
A previous comment pointed out that the Library of Alexandria burned too, yet the difference in burnt books is: if a version still exists, it can be appreciated in all its glory, not the case with a recorded performance master. The copies are never the same
12
@Ras The Exhorted
Connie not commie
If the original masters have so little value which is what most commenters suggest then someone should have bought them for very little money . The originals probably had tremendous value and were lost in a freak accident.
The artists themselves ahould have bought them back if they had as little value as commenters think they had
The ability to mix, master and re-release music today, whether digital or analog, is better than it ever has been in the history of recorded music. Whether you vigorously love music or not I hope we can all appreciate that this astounding cultural tragedy is no different from a wing of the Louvre burning down and leaving us with only photographs and memories of the original masterworks. We can thankfully put a new roof on Notre Dame Cathedral but sadly not for this massive loss of America's glorious musical heritage.
12
@Will
The article suggests that the original vinyl albums that people collect would not be nearly as good as new ones made from the original masters
Nothing lasts forever whether it be galaxies, buildings, books, or in this case, original recordings. Humankind may also disappear someday. Everything is small when seen against a boundless, timeless universe.
2
The artists should own and control the masters- not the record labels and the rights should expire to the public domain 20 years after the artist's death.
The current system is stupid beyond understanding.
Why anyone would store precious and fragile archives in Southern California is beyond me. The place is prone to massive fires, earthquakes and is one of the most expensive places for just about anything in this country.
9
On a positive note : "The fire most likely claimed most of Chuck Berry’s Chess masters". If that includes "johnny be good" that's a plus!
2
It’s not only fire which destroys musical history, it’s greed and disrespect as well.
My husband worked for a small, LA based music publisher a few years back which catered to independent, unrepresented folk and blues artists. He was laid off as a first round of layoffs just prior to this company being swallowed up by a very large German held music conglomerate. Though he no longer worked there, he maintained key friendships, one of which contacted him a few days into the big move with some shocking news; the CEO had ordered the vast majority of the archival materials and masters to be thrown into a dumpster. His friend called him as he stood on his car, reached into the dumpster and pulled out one master tape after another. My husband was angry and perplexed when he heard what had been tossed. This friend took what he could and filled up his car with one of a kind recordings, some of which are too painful and revealing to recount here; but somewhere in East LA are musical treasures saved by an alert hero.
10
Would not the artists have been given a duplicate? Surely they would want to have one.
@Andy Hain
Of course, they may have a copy or duplicate of their recordings, but they are by definition, not a master (and mostly owned by the recording companies).
1
@Expat
Then why not make more than one master?
The loss of these masters and what they held, and represent, is quite overwhelming.
Much like the loss of a million species of animals, insects, and life that are going extinct because of denial, arrogance and indifference.
The parallels of humanities destruction, and inability to see the importance and value of things is endless.
Thank you for putting light on a history that many still view as disposable or “copyable.”
I wish Aronson well. He did a justice by sharing his story and experience with what happened. It’s a good thing that the truth was swept out from under the rug.
9
@Leslita
99+% of species on earth in the past are extinct.
As Whitney Houston would say What's greed got to do with it? The masters were valuable so lots of money was lost when they were lost.
Stunningly tragic and depressing, but this article does raise a lot of issues about proper archival storage and ownership of master recordings.
Along with friends, around 20 years ago I made a lot of two track (stereo) live recordings onto DAT (digital audio tape) and then started making digital multitrack recordings onto hard drives at high sample rates (24 bit, 96kHz). This was back when computer processing was slow and gigabyte storage was expensive. If we didn't have a friend who worked at a hard drive manufacturer, I don't know if we could have afforded to do as much as we did.
Fast forward to today when I've long been out of the recording game and my masters have been sitting in boxes in the closet for 15 to 20 years. DAT players are hard to come by and don't work well any more. I was able to get some 20 year old recordings moved into a computer recently, but DAT tapes have a finite lifespan. My friend said some of his masters won't play. One of the tapes I popped into a working deck immediately got eaten. Old hard drives have mechanical failures. The original masters are destined to become unplayable. It's a matter of physics.
The best we can do now is prioritize recordings by rarity and importance and get them transferred to backup drives and redundant/cloud storage as soon as possible. The masters themselves will exist as physical objects, but the music on them will be lost.
It takes real dedication to maintain master recordings. Such a shame at Universal.
4
Tremendous reporting and storytelling. Thank you.
2
This brilliantly written and reported piece made me feel physically ill. Eleven years to learn about this massive American cultural catastrophe?? The lack of basic preventions by massively wealthy corporations cannot be overstated. With just a few phone calls, I'm sure the likes of Keith Richards would have gladly paid to have at least the Chess masters protected in the finest storage possible. Bands like REM would have gladly guarded the most pristine evidence of their work. I still feel sick.
8
This should be the begining of a movement to undo the unneeded extension of copyright law shovelled through by Sonny Bono in the 1980's. If a copyright owner has destroyed or no longer possesses the original masters, they loose the monopoly protection WE the people have granted them. We grant copy right protection to encourage the production of new art, not to enable rent-taking of shareholders and executives distant in time from the creation.
6
The author's dismissal of digital archiving and elevation of metaphysical properties to 'real' masters is part of the reason we are so bad at archiving. There is a difference between a painting and a photograph but a digital copy of a master is not like a photograph, it's like a 3D laser scan down to the individual molecule of pigment in the paint.
Mixing up the low fidelity of consumer mp3 formats and master quality digital files contributes to the notion that preserving the originals is the only way to save our heritage. As this fire proves and the lament of Iron Mountain's obscured vaults highlights, digital is the only way to safely preserve these treasures and keep them accessible to artists and listeners.
Yes a digital master can be corrupted (but usually a tiny bit of effort is all that's needed to recover a hard drive just like recovering a damaged tape) but that's why you make multiple copies all identical and equal. Yes LTO is only backward compatible for 2 generations but you can by LTO 1st generation tape drives by the pallet load (new in box) on ebay for little more than the price of shipping. Where are you going to find a metal master or 1930s multi track tape deck when only a couple hundred were ever made vs tens of millions of LTO drives?
Digital is the solution. Digital is cheap. Digital is reliable. Digital keeps your archive accessible. Important originals are nice for important museums, but only for novelty.
5
Severe negligence and carelessness by UMG. The building was no ‘vault.’
The artists and their legacies should pursue stiff legal remedies from UMG.
3
Yeah. They should and they would win. But nothing can change what has happened.
3
A slight aside.....but word has it that you rarely see black and white clips from the first 10-years of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, because some NBC bean-counter decided that the huge video tapes were taking up too much space.....so, he ordered engineers to record new programs over the old video tapes(to save space and money). So, most of the Carson stuff you see, is from after the move to Burbank. The New York era shows are rarely around. I can't verify the story, but have heard that from some people in the industry.
5
If I could post images here, I have photos of the original tape boxes of "Buddy Holly" and "The Chirping Crickets" taken a few years ago.....also the Lynrd Skynrd tapes definitely didn't burn up......
3
Another reason that digital storage isn't the answer: the potential for hacking. I won't even suggest possible details. By the way, this article, written by a music lover, seems to assume that New York Times readeers care only about American popular music (or the Beatles or Yoko Ono). Another shovel full of dirt on the heritage of classical music, which is mentioned only as briefly as possible, with no classical artists named. If we're lucky, all of Decca's best classical masters have been kept in Britain. But have they? Perhaps there were no masters for world music, but is that so? How about Broadway cast albums?
6
The article states "The vault housed tape masters for Decca." That would specifically be U.S. or American Decca, which had wholly separated from British Decca in 1937. The two companies weren't joined again until the MCA and PolyGram labels merged in 1999 and created Universal Music.
There are a few factual errors in what is otherwise a very well researched and written story. For instance, the master tapes for Steppenwolf's first album and a few other Steppenwolf albums were not in the fire, nor was "Buddy Holly" (the album with "Peggy Sue" and "Words of Love" etc.). Patsy Cline's "Greatest Hits" was not in the fire either, and there are others referenced in the story as having been burned in the fire, that have been reissued on vinyl by Analogue Productions from the original master tapes that I've seen photos of and that mastering engineer Kevin Gray will confirm. Trust me, no digital versions produced from those same tapes can compare to those records! Though they sound "very good".....it's like the Buddy Holly Hologram tour coming up, versus seeing him "live"!
5
@Michael FREMER I certainly hope so - but would like to have a little more information as to how we can know for a certainty where the Holly masters are. We've all seen reissues that advertise as being from the original masters when they aren't, exactly, even if they sound very good.
1
What a SAD sad story. Terrific article and reporting.
Like so often in America those at the top, guilty of negligence, criminal negligence with regard to caring for artist masters, walked off free as birds and most likely with huge paydays and bonuses. Dissembling weasels the lot of them.
Meanwhile the artists and public were sold a phony story about "minor losses".
As with historic buildings being torn down for more profits for developers greed, those historic masters will never be recovered nor heard again.
Those responsible should have paid a harsh price for their negligence but they profited instead.
Here's hoping archival standards are vastly improved. But somehow saving Britney Spears or Jonas Brothers masters today is a far far Cry from losing the priceless art of Coltrane, Franklin, Ellington and hundreds of other genuine genius artists of the 20th Century.
I hope the artists get what little satisfaction they can from this shocker coming out now.
What a sad story for the hundreds of millions of people who love great music.
5
This hurts my heart.
4
The lamentation over the loss of these recordings reeks of a fetish. There have been Chuck Berrys, Sinatras and Tupacs for thousands of years. Before 1900 or so every human community had its own musical style and stylists. If they (or you) traveled you might get a taste of what they were playing in the next county/ country/ continent over.
It's very boomerish to assume these recordings were priceless because they're familiar. They did not represent some apotheosis of human history. They were snapshots of particular instants of commerce, technology, art and culture. The tragedy lies in realizing all of our pleasures and most of our treasures hold no value for the future.
They're like boxes of uncurated photographs from your grandparents; vaguely meaningful mementos to you but indistinguishable from their contemporaries, and to your grandchildren (and inundated historians), rubbish.
Personally, a musician's recordings should go on their pyre. Their music will survive (or not) to the degree it resonates with the future.
6
This is a fearless perspective. Thank you.
2
I must disagree with your post.
I purchase music to ‘hear it again’ and again. To me and most, “Play it again Sam” without a personal pianist is s recording.
By recordings my young son is grateful to know music from previous generations as great rock and roll. He listens to Howlin Wolf and Muddy Waters because they inspired The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Eric Clapton. He’s listened to Big Bands because Paul McCartney’s dad played their music. Music history is far more than an old story when the masters can be used to
make music alive on todays devices.
8
@Grignon
No one is claiming the lost masters as representing some "apotheosis of human history". It is a part of American cultural history and as such, a huge loss to the country, the music industry and music lovers everywhere. Your analogy to shoe-box full of old photos of some random grandparents is factitious - nobody outside of that particular family would care if they got lost or burnt.
4
When I think of Buddy Holly, exhausted, cold, and ready to be done with touring for a while, climbing on that shoddy plane in a snowstorm, effectively killing himself to entertain us while making a buck...my conclusion on reading this fantastic article, is that he was utterly failed by the very industry that profited off of his genius. And they didn't even have the guts to admit it. Devastating.
7
What a terrific and sad article.
In response to several comments that seem to ascribe this loss to some modern fault in the human condition, the great library of Alexandria burned. Wars were fought in and around the Parthenon, leading to its current condition. Humans in general seem to be somewhat poor preservationists, only realizing the necessity of caring and cataloging art, culture and knowledge until it is nearly too late.
We've seen it in film, and now in music with more light being shed on this tragic loss. Heck, you even see it in video games. While everything is digital these days, the old Atari and Nintendo cartridges from the 1980's and 1990's will someday soon degrade and no longer function. Due to lack of hard drive space and the need to press on to the hot new technology, it is likely that a good bit of the original source code for these early games is lost. Just yesterday I learned that game development giant Square Enix has taken over 20 years to issue a re-mastered version of its masterpiece Final Fantasy 8 because it deleted much of its source code to clear up space for the development new games.
Everything is fleeting...
46
The best article I think I have ever read in the NYT. And such an important article, too. It made me quite literally sick to read about the extent of the fire, but it is so important that everyone, particularly those in the music industry and those who enjoy music, read this article. I can’t help but wonder how many unknown artists (to me or to the majority of the world) I could have discovered had there not been a fire in that warehouse....
7
Corporations and governments routinely condemn journalists for trying to "trap" their spokespeople by repeating questions after getting improbable answers, for probing beneath the surface of incredulous assertions, and for not taking prepared press statements as pre-printed gospel.
When it's broadcast, it may be hard for viewers to understand why. Well here's Exhibit #1. Universal Music executives from that period should feel embarrassment, humiliation, naked ridicule.
Do they? Naahhh.
5
When art is regarded as product, it's all too easy for something like this to happen, whether it's a massive, one-time loss, or the drip, drip, drip of masters disappearing one at a time due to neglect. Heartbreaking.
6
@jrwValuable art is far more likely to survive than junk
Unfortunately, the world as we have allowed it to evolve no longer has need of history, tradition or the integrity of creative effort. There is only Tomorrrow, and the profits to be made by the exploitation of anything that can be foisted on the world by virtue of need, greed or simple distraction.
3
Music is a beautiful thing. It has power even for those with Alzheimer's. On the other hand: We all face the threat of destruction from nuclear warheads. As does every civilized inch of this planet. That includes matter far more important than these masters. Many of those who want to hear pure sound are losing their hearing. No digital hearing aids will likely ever get that sound back for a high percentage of those who want to hear the music of their past. By the time many of the young people refine their musical tastes they may be old enough to lose hearing as well. The real tragedy for the purist is the limitations of hearing with time.
2
Thank you for this article. I was tearing up while reading it.
I think we need to recognize that master recordings are our collective musical heritage and we must treat them as such.
Corporations are in the business of making profits. They are ill-suited to to the task of preserving. Preservation should be left to institutions such as libraries and national archives.
7
Enlightening article regarding extent of loss, storage issues, and potential impact. Thank you!
1
Excellent piece of journalism, it’s almost surprising how well this tragedy was written. Thanks Jody...
3
That's Hollywood (Lost Angeles)! Unique breed, they are. Store this irreplaceable asset in a wooden building that's over 100 years old, with little or no rain, and average June temperatures in the 90's or 100's. Today, June 11th, it was 99 degrees in the valley where the Warner Brothers lot is located. Not to forget about the asphalt roof repairs at 3 am in the morning.
An accident waiting to happen? Or, don't put all your eggs in one basket?
2
Re Sgt. Pepper, I thought that Micheal Jackson owned all of the Beatle master tapes. What became of those after his passing?
@Patrick he owned the publishing rights. The physical masters and recordings were kept in EMI (now Warner) vaults in England. Every bit of surviving Beatles tape has been backed up in HiRez digital, according to Giles Martin. That's how he reassembled all of the parts for the Sgt. Peppers remix.
3
Michael Jackson owned the publishing rights to a majority of their compositions. The master tapes are owned by the record company.
Jackson outbid Paul McCartney for those publishing rights but it does not include any Apple Corps recordings, the publishing company The Beatles set up once their Capital Records contract ended. That is indeed most of their recordings, probably 3/4 or more.
“Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.” Friedrich Schiller
2
All this because a multi-billion dollar company was too cheap to have a 24-hour fire watch after heating asphalt singles with a flipping blowtorch at 3 in the morning. Sorry, Trane, Satchmo, Ella, Bing, Buddy, Muddy, Duke, Dizz, Merle, Fats, and Elton, et al. And now we’ll never know what they were really singing in “Louie, Louie”.
14
@Rick
Corporations are interested in profit . You imply that the corporation didn't think these masters were valuable so why didn't people including the artists buy them from the corporations at fire sale prices before the fire?
Now I know why UMG told me they couldn't find recording masters on a client, that we wanted to license for a special project.
Bet my attorney is waiting for my call.
Thank you NYT for great reporting.
18
This is the saddest article The NYTimes has published in years. I love rock music and to think my 50 year old albums are the best sound I’ll ever hear from an artist comes from those pressings is just down right depressing. Thank goodness Neil Young and Bob Dylan have their own archivists. Maybe more artists should follow their lead.
7
Beautifully written. Wonderfully detailed. Terribly depressing.
9
THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR TAKING THE TIME TO RESEARCH AND WRITE THIS! Epic, sprawling journalism. We're lucky in a way, however, that album outtakes were kept at all. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe alternate takes of movie shoots were kept. I believe all cutting room floor footage was scrapped after the film was released. For instance, there's a scene that was cut from "The Birds." (Hitchcock) When it came out on DVD with a bounty of xtras, a few stills, the script and storyboards were all that survived. I also wonder how much of this individual artists may have kept in their own possession. Once studio-funded sessions were over with, did all master tapes automatically go to the label? Hmmmm .... anybody know?
2
Who would have ever thought that these priceless recordings in a non fireproof building. Could be in danger on a dry so cal hill?
A sad epitaph for the masters and possibly yet another consequence of mergers, acquisitions and monopolies...
1
Outstanding article. Thank you for taking the time to research this travesty. As an audio enthusiast, one is always endeavoring to get as close to source as possible. Listen as the artist and mastering artist intended. For UMG to be this cavalier regarding the safety of these treasures is truly a travesty. While costly and impractical for most, labels should take a cue from how the immense treasure that is the Grateful Dead’s canon is archived
6
The library at ancient Alexandria comes to mind. The library at Timbuktu. The digital age may save all our knowledge but the templates for civilization seem always to be under threat and thus, our cultures.
6
Long Long Time Ago...I can still remember how that music use to make me smile.
4
As an audio engineer for the past 35 years I have witnessed the gradual decline in audio fidelity. I cringed the first time I heard a solo cello's sound break up when transferred to CD. It's the same story in the audio recording world, where now that everyone can do it at home or in a corner office at work, the convenience, lower cost, and DIY mentality produces mediocrity that satisfies. Music recording today is either done in a basement or a high-end studio with investors, there are no middle studios anymore where artists can go to create good master recordings. The sad part is, people are happy with mediocrity. Recordings are compressed to limited dynamic range, so quiet listening is no longer required. Maybe a solution could be that a recording museum could be created where people could go listen to a master recording or its first duplication in an intimate studio setting. Different rooms for different kinds of artists. Maybe in this way the originals could be both preserved and listened to in a way that equates with observing an original painting.
21
I can't offer Jody Rosen enough praise for this piece. What an extraordinary amount of work this must have required. Thank you, Jody, and be proud — it's a masterpiece.
31
Greed did this, plain and simple. The masters would probably never have suffered the fate of the 2008 fire had the companies that originally owned and created the music managed to archive their masters at their original locations. Sure, merging of companies will always exist and with it the accumulation of another company's assets, but what happened to the music industry in the 80's and 90's has no precedent. It was greed that led to ever more purchases and growing monopoly of the recorded music over the last 100 years. All owned by three or fewer companies, who basically only cared about a small percent of their archives.
Their neglect was predictable and the result is 2008.
19
@brians3
Yep, greed. And here is some more greed for you: why even contractually demand to maintain possession of the master tapes if you're not going to store them properly? Why not give the artists the master tapes after, say, 10 years? The artists are more motivated to store them properly, and even if not, then only that artist's tapes would be lost in a fire, not hundreds of thousands of tapes. Furthermore, it would relieve the label of responsibility (and cost). So why not? Because, that's why. There may be a buck to be made later. Or, in the case of wholesale destruction: if I can't make a buck off these tapes, then no one else can either. The American businessman, servicing the customer (RIP George).
11
This is so unfathomably sad. Music -- especially American roots music -- plays a huge role in my life and I had never heard about this disaster. The lack of reverence for these truly important works is consistent with our general lack of reverence for the art that musicians make and the effort it takes to make it. With the exception of the mega-stars, far too many musicians (even those of stature) barely eke out a living and rely on GoFundMe to cover healthcare costs. And yet they keep making music. Because they just can't not do it.
12
A generation has grown up listening to MP3's on earbuds. They have no idea what pristine audio sounds like.
11
The executives at CBS would have taped over The Beatles on Ed Sullivan if it would have saved a nickle. (The Sullivan family kept the tapes). I heard of one TV station that built a new building. When they moved in they took tons; forty something years worth of local tv, news, commercials, etc.; and threw it away! They willfully destroyed historical artifacts; which is crime. The claim? "We don't have room." The new building had plenty of room!
As far as the storage; most of which is (hopefully was) horrible; if tapes are kept in the case that was built for that tape; and that case is scotch taped shut; the results are surprising - stuff from the fifties can sound new. Also, Iron Mountain just keeps stuff; if you send them unwound reels stuffed into manila envelopes - that is what you get back after storing it. They don't repack your stuff. The bean counters will never look at old tapes or films as an asset. Any company with a large amount of footage should store it digitally (all of it). Sure that's not the originals but at least you will have it if a tragedy like Universal happens.
12
This loss is immeasurable - tapes like these hold the gold of our culture. Tape was often let run through entire sessions. Imagine the conversations. Imagine the jams. Oh Lordy imagine the jams.... The idea that the raw music first recorded by Billie Holliday is just gone due to corporate negligence makes me heartsick. Much of this should have been in the Smithsonian. At least they know how to store items. The whole country has lost something of immense value. Maybe we should make a point and all get in on the lawsuit to come.
16
Too sad to read.
9
Thank you for this brilliant piece of work. You’ve filled many of us in on a major part of music history which needed to be told. I hope there is more to come.
5
My heart goes out to Mr. Aronson, who probably experienced a lot of feelings over the past decade. Best wishes to him and his family.
14
I felt very sad reading this article. My beloved mother introduced me to many of these artists from her childhood and youth. If she were alive today she would be devastated, as are we.
10
The media companies (iTunes, Amazon Music, Spotify, Pandora, etc) will never be able take advantage of 5G and superior audio equipment to stream hi-res FLAC transfers from the masters of these classics. We will only hear the copies of copies.
9
All things are impermenant, it just seems in current times, things are becoming that way at a faster rate.
7
Anyone who is into genealogy knows that the 1890 Federal Census was destroyed in a fire in 1921.
7
This made me profoundly sad. Thank you for wonderfully written article
4
A LOSS GREATER THAN WHAT OCCURRED AT NOTRE DAME, is there is no remedy or rescue, as executives , lie to preserve the stock price and the value of assets they are no longer in their repository. SHAME ON UNIVERSAL who in their neglect accomplished what an Isis attack would have.
24
So UMG told the public nothing of value was lost in the fire. Then they filed for insurance claiming it was worth a lot. Sounds like insurance fraud. Maybe somebody should look into this.
25
Beautifully written and hauntingly sad. Thanks for the introduction to Don Bennett.
12
A wonderful piece, an example of why people call this the best newspaper in the world.
27
@Christopher Hawtree
I call it one of the worst. The WSJ is much better except for their stance on amnesty .
Another disaster of the Dubya years.
2
Articles like this are why I subscribe to NYT.
Artists themselves sometimes don't appreciate the importance of recordings. The Grateful Dead is a case in point. When a storage unit containing hundreds of irreplaceable soundboard recordings went up for auction in the 1980s, the band was told but didn't bid. Others did and the recordings, many waterlogged from floods and otherwise in horrible condition, were restored by fans who bought them and, ultimately, preserved for the world to enjoy.
18
Are you referring to the “Betty Boards”? Betty Cantor-Jackson is a glaring omission on those STEM lists to get girls interested in science. I see a girl dissecting something mechanical or electronic, I tell her about Betty. She never got the pay or recognition she deserved with the Dead, but she’s still practicing her craft. Go Betty!
2
@Susan O’Donnell
She was just a hack not a scientist
Excellent, in-depth article. I am an audiophile and I've never heard of this fire, it was expertly minimized. But the music industry has always been about $$$$ and not about nourishing the talent or, heaven forbid, archiving the music. Even today they are consumed with making money anyway they can. Music is poorly recorded, compressed and often dishonestly marketed as 'remastered' when it is the same old stuff. There is much dishonesty in the entertainment business, both audio and film/video. Much blame to go around, sad to say.
21
@Evitzee
I guess you think Mick Jagger or Taylor Swift should work for free. Actually Taylor should work for free
Doubtless, while we music lovers were moaning and holding our heads in our hands, leisurely lunches, cigars, and rounds of golf were enjoyed today and every day by unaccountable members of the class that profits from their ownership and control of immeasurably valuable content.
5
I had already been thinking of the Notre Dame fire when I came to that chapter titled Cathedral. Both cateclysms were momentus losses to western civilization. One could pooh pooh the loss of some pop music as insignificant in comparison but those sounds touched more around the globe in our lifetime than ever set eyes on the cathedral. Both are lamentable and remind us that all is ephemeral. Take nothing for granted if you value it.
7
I'm surprised that the author did not contact Ace Records UK, for decades one of the best re-issue labels in the world. They certainly knew about the fire because they are always trying to license material. They also appreciate music from the 1950s-60s-70s much more than most American companies who can only be bothered with best-selling artists.
Earlier this decade Ace was lucky to locate original tapes (in another UMG storage facility) for an unreleased LP by an artist. When trying to license these tapes, UMG lawyers asked Ace to "prove to us (UMG) that we own it." This showed how little the U.S. companies care about music history.
17
I'm disappointed that the baseless fetishization of lossless audio is treated like dogma in this article.
Lossless is important for remastering due to the extra production headroom, but for listening purposes variable bitrate lossy formats like v0 mp3's are indistinguishable from lossless in every single double-blind study ever.
That's the whole point of v0 mp3's, that they're mathematically identical to lossless during playback.
9
@asdfj excpet without masters, ther's no original to generate anything from.
All those recordings still 'in the can'? They're toast. They say artists achieve imortality through their work. Many artists are now dead, forever and ever.
19
You are talking apples and oranges. A master, whether digital or analog is different from a final “consumer mix” recording. The master has the separate tracks. There is also the final master made from the mix of the master tracks. I assume both of these, the master tracks and the mix master are stored together, although they most likely are on separate reels. But if you loose the master tracks , there is no way to recover it from a mastered recording, even if you try to separate the frequencies of the various instruments. There may be individual tracks on the master reel that never made it to the mix, or were only partial used to make to master mix.
22
Not to mention that his claims about MP3 are nonsense
19
Not to rain on the parade here, but the reason artists and film-makers treat their masters differently is that music has traditionally been about a live-performance, while film-making has been a sausage making exercise in technical "film-making".
You won't find too many live-musical or Opera virtuoso's stressing about the preservation of filmed performances. Each performance is slightly unique. Each performer brings something different to their roles. And in the same way, if you wanted a "new take" on a traditional folk song, you would give it to a new performer to do. That's how music used to work. How many songs previously recorded by other groups did the Beatles press?
It's only in the past 20 years -- the age of hyper intellectual property ownership and the associated milking or re-mixed and re-mastered recordings that the matter of archival recordings becomes significant in terms of generating a long term annuity.
Also, it's kind of confusing in this article, but my understanding is that Masters themselves are not the "original source". Masters themselves are usually a copy of the original session tapes. It may be impossible to re-create the master exactly, but if the source recordings are still around, it's at least possible in theory. So it's possible UMG was not just spinning the story. The masters are certainly important, the same way a Guttenberg bible is important, but it's not the original -- it's still a copy.
2
@Gene The master is the original.....it's the imprint layed down on the magnetic tape. It is the start of ANY reproducible medium for that performance. Comparing this to a Guttenberg bible is not equivalent. Of course the Guttenberg is a copy, but the master tape of a Louis Armstrong holds the highest quality recording, it is NOT a copy.
10
@Gene One might say the same with regard to film. Before film recording became possible, there were live theater performances. There is of course something magical about live performance of music for the very reasons you mention. Creativity, spontaneity, improvisation - all happening right before your eyes, or ears as it were - and never to be heard that same way again. The Grateful Dead and their fans understood that power. However, Jerry Garcia's never going to play live for me again, just as Caruso or Billie or anybody else I love who's passed isn't going to. I've been grateful every day of my life for the recording of music that was before my time, and for the ability to share that beautiful cultural heritage with my children. It's nothing short of a crime that this was allowed to happen - through greed, ignorance and apathy. The further I got in this article, the more physically ill I became. Because it's something that can never be fixed. No amends can be made. What was beautiful and MASTERFUL is now gone forever, and my heart is broken.
3
Specifically regarding digital formats, an item is considered properly archived when it exists in 3 discrete places, so that if a disaster befalls a set of files in one location, there will still remain 2 sets of clones. For digitally-originated assets, this is easily accomplished -- it's a matter of the time it takes to transfer files to a specific storage medium or a cloud, which can often be done unattended. Any outfit adhering to Best Practices does this routinely.
But for analog assets, transferring from the original medium is laborious, time-consuming, and often dependent on legacy playback equipment. It's tragic that the UMG fire destroyed assets that had no redundancy. But the prevailing attitude is, alas, common.
I had my own recent experience with executive-level personnel discounting the value of archival material. I work for a large multi-national, in the dept. that maintains our U.S. archive. When we moved to a new, smaller building with inadequate storage space, we asked the president for budget to store hard-copy assets dating back 35 years. He said to throw them out! We resisted -- once gone, they'd be irretrievable -- and he repeated his directive. So my group worked down to the wire, ranking tapes by importance and salvaging what we could.
If I told you the name of my company, you wouldn't believe that we discarded the bulk of our history... on orders from the top!
82
@D Price
Business executives have no desire to look backward, it has little value to a newly minted C-suite individual. They only look forward, to what will be accomplished on their watch. Hence the reasoning for tossing their history in the garbage can.
10
Let’s not forget the underlying cause for the disaster:
Outdated construction design using inefficient cheap materials such as tar roofing.
7
@F R It's amazing how many structure fires are caused by roofing "renovations" - including the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris.
6
I simply don't believe this; how is it possible something this tragic was allowed to happen? Why weren't these priceless recordings not properly fireproof stored and archived?!
3
So...interesting read...sad part is, perhaps a greater loss went down when the music business took down a private torrent tracker...had been 10 years plus in existence...the last resting place of many an obscure vinyl release...some called it on par with the library of alexandria...i don't know but if you ask me, leave it, unencumbered by profit, to those who care, it will be preserved...may even get a second chance.
5
There are a few noble folks, like Mr. Rosen, dedicated to preserving as much as possible of media history. Among the collectors, archivists, librarians and museum people in this line were also a couple of local news broadcasters. Both having worked as anchors at one of the first eleven channels in the U.S., they went dumpster diving when their channel converted to a different tape format and did not see a monetary value in providing storage. The couple personally saved a lot of the history of local broadcast news reporting from the Civil Rights Era - only to donate it to a college library, which tried valiantly with grant applications, but could not afford to digitize much of it before the playback equipment went nearly extinct. Presumably moldering away still, a very tiny sample of it has been digitized:
https://cdm16352.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16352coll1
7
Most songs you hear on Spotify or Sirius are 100th generation recorded songs or more (as in a tape of a tape of a tape - to the 100th time). There's a distinct difference when you hear a tune closer to the master. Here's a Buddy Holly recording that is less than 6 generations removed, and you can hear the difference. Thanks for this riveting article - hopefully, it will open the eyes of music lovers everywhere for the need to preserve our national musical treasures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9J9FlarNOA
5
I work in risk management, and the notion that as recently as 2008 the major studios had such a haphazard emergency plan for these priceless artifacts is just ridiculous. Fire is a fairly well known hazard at this point. I can assure you all that data centers around this country and abroad are built to exacting standards that render destruction like this virtually impossible. So rest assured -- your Facebook posts are safe for time immemorial.
Film prints and anything else recorded to magnetic tape is notoriously flammable and delicate material. The major studios are keepers of cultural treasures beyond imagining -- not to mention media libraries that drive their own business models. The notion that no one ever sat down and applied themselves to the problem of safeguarding these materials is mind boggling and very sad.
Ah, humanity.
73
@Andrew Lloyd Only nitrate film (used before 1952) is highly flammable and magnetic tape is not flammable. (The boxes it's stored in is more flammable than the tape itself.) That's not to say it won't burn in a fire, but it doesn't add to the burn anymore than any other material.
5
I guess it is no surprise that the first statements were no real damage, nothing of value was lost, not a crisis, .... I suppose it is more of what are you going to believe - what I say or what you see. And the 'what I say' always sounds better.
2
Take-aways from this piece: music company execs are greedy, clueless, and dishonest, and are incapable of safeguarding our cultural heritage. But I think we already knew this. Absolutely criminal that Universal failed to protect the masters. Advances in recording and storage technology in my lifetime, spanning from 78 rpm records, wire recorders, and the first reel to reel tape machines through LPs of various generations, to badly digitized CDs to remastering; recording technology from mic manufacture and placement, mono to stereo, cheap record players to high-tech "HiFi" playback equipment, CDs and DVDs. And then some profit-oriented bozos store the masters in a back-lot warehouse where it burns up. The Louvre museum was opened to the public in 1793. You can still see many of the treasures housed there for more than two centuries. Meanwhile, Universal can't safeguard source material for a third of that duration, not because they couldn't have done it, but because it would have cost money. Shameful.
15
Tragic to say the least. (And by saying the least, they compounded the tragedy.)
2
The way the Universal Music Group 's publicity hacks covered up this tremendous cultural loss reminds me of the way Boeing is covering its responsibility for the the recent crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Disgusting, and then with even more unethical behavior they fire fire Mr Aronson.
Now I understand why Chuck Berry recordings sound so thin. If I remember correctly, Chuck Berry's recorded music is aboard the Voyager spacecraft which is now leaving our planetary system.
A similar space trip to exile could appropriate for those publicity hound dogs.
3
A corporation lied and the media covered up for them rather than investigate. No surprises there.
1
Like the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, this loss is incalculable and will surely be seen as a tragedy for generations to come. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned from concentrating an irreplaceable cultural legacy in the hands of a few reckless, greedy corporations.
3
@Joseph Damrell
The Library of Alexander fire is an apt reference in one sense inasmuch as extant fragments of ancient writings only hint at the depth of what was lost, such as the Pythagoreans or the Pre Socratics. But in another sense, when the master tapes were fully transferred into recordings which was their main functional purpose, they have done what they were meant to do. If classic car models like ‘64 Mustangs or ‘63 Stingrays were made like this, would car buffs go bonkers if they found out that Ford and GM had long since thrown away the original stamping presses for them?
Fire and corporate stupidity are just two of the myriad dangers that threaten recorded sound. Chemically-unstable/degraded media, poor handling/storage, damage during playback and general indifference to preservation affected every recording and recording media I worked with as a recording engineer and later as an archivist from the mid 1980s to the present. Reel-to-Reel tape from the 1980s often turned to dust by the 1990s. Digital Audio Tape(DAT) was ridiculously fragile even in it's very brief heyday. CDs and digital have an 'all-or-nothing' value as media and thus need to be duplicated and replaced frequently.
3
Having been both a very serious music enthusiast since my teenage years, and later a representative of many leading recording artists in the music world, the article is obviously disturbing. But it is also important to point out that there is also other respected opinion about the nature of the loss on the technical side; and the article seems to dismiss other views in painting the industry as utterly bad. Thus, from an industry technical expert who worked on the problem at the time, I offer the following quote - which the author should have shared, as a matter of responsible journalism: "I think this article is way over blown with hyperbole. The vast majority of masters destroyed in the fire had broadcast wave files located at other locations and are still used today to replicate the masters that were lost in the fire, not MP3 files as suggested in the article. Although it is always best to have the original masters, broadcast wave files are the next best thing". This doesn't diminish the significance of the event - but it does provide readers with a balanced account of the details.
1
I know! Maybe if I start the day reading about music news instead of politics I won’t rise from bed angry and depressed...
4
In the early seventies I was a recording engineer for RCA records in Hollywood. One of the things we did when our
regular work was slack was to spool two inch sixteen track tape
off of metal reels and disgard it so the metal reels could
be used again.I don't remember why they had us doing this,
it may have been to clear up more storage space in the vault
There certainly was no shortage of two inch take up reels
in the place. As we were destroying the sixteen track masters,it would be impossible to make any new mixes
from them.This always seemed rather stupid to me at the
time.
27
@KT
The reels were sold for scrap metal, most likely. Pennies on the dollar, when you think of the treasures that might have been on the tapes! Elvis? Harry Nilsson? Who knows?
Maybe the Iron Mountain-type storage is the answer. Outsource the storing and care for a fee to people who know what they are doing.
6
@KT
You could have sold the used tape to Jerry and Shelly at Coast lol
I did that in the mid 80's instead of selling blood ;-) They sold reels of used tape to demo studios. I think a new reel of 2" was around $175, used was maybe like $50 or so.
Also, since tape could be bought cheaper on the hub, the flanges were likely in shorter supply at RCA.
1
I’d like to read some follow up on this...and see the responses of artists and estates that were not aware of the losses.
The article reminded me of the mind-blowing idiocy demonstrated by Twentieth Century Fox when they dumped their original film negatives into the ocean.
1
Just another corporate write-off.
It's not about yesterday or next week. It's about today and tomorrow.
2
Bring it on. Maybe throw a tip in the busker's case. Live music will forever be the real music.
1
Negligence. Absolutely unreal, like the CBS masters debacle and the unforgivable loss of Elvis masters by RCA, this just makes me sick.
3
I remember as a kid on a bicycle in Brooklyn going past the old Vitagraph film studios on Avenue M and seeing them carting away garbage...
Old acetate film taken during the silent era.
Lost forever.
7
Reading this article makes one cry! Those master recordings represents the best in MELODIC music something that´s rare in today´s world.
The best of the best that represented American jazz and pop music.
How could the studio be so stupid? Those master recordings should have been in a FIRE-PROOF vault!
Overall, it´s really ashame!!!!!
3
Everything a talented artist makes should be digitized and stored in multiple locations. There should be an National Archival Cloud for this purpose. The longer you preserve culture the more impact it can have on humanity. The tragedy is that one company hoarded all this material in one location. Their greed has essentially stolen from us all something truly irreplaceable.
1
Thank you for this fantastic article. It made me both very angry and very sad.
All that unheard music that will never see the light of day because record companies just couldn't be bothered to care. What a tragedy.
3
It's devastating and incredibly depressing to learn of this over a decade later. This is a direct result of having only three companies control nearly our entire musical heritage, and the fact that anti-trust enforcement is nearly non-existent in today's world.
Not only are the outtakes, rejects, and banter gone, but also so much audio that would likely one-day be found and enhanced by better technology.
It's just unbelievably sad.
6
Thank you for this fantastic journalism. This is why I subscribe to the The New York Times. As a working professional in the business, this information is essential to the public. Such a tragedy - and for UMG and likely scores of other music companies to push out misinformation to music lovers everywhere helps no one. Hopefully Mr. Aronson will be rewarded in some way for helping to expose the truth.
11
The disaster unveiled in this article is exactly what we should expect from mega-corporations whose executives were indoctrinated to believe their exclusive mission is to maximize short-term gain for institutional investors who don't care about anything else.
"What came before,"-- inadequately assets inherited from generations of mergers and acquisitions-- is either a storage expense to slash, or one of many assets to be bundled for the next round of spinoffs, swaps, mergers, and other financial transactions that create instant short-term "value." Even if something has the potential to create value in the long term, the relentless pressure to produce immediate "results" mandates its sacrifice unless executives can recognize its obvious contribution to this quarter's bottom line.
It's the same reason corporate lobbyists invest in Republican politicians to deny and ignore climate change. Nothing must get in the way of the Corporate Supreme Imperative of creating short-term "shareholder value." If the result is a disaster, that's a problem for another CEO in a future quarter to deal with. We mustn't let that distract from doing whatever it takes to increase today's Numbers and please the Wall Street analysts and traders!
31
Perhaps we need to establish something like the landmarks preservation commission or the world cultural heritage organizations to preserve our musical and film heritage. There should be requirements as to appropriate storage and backup of these irreplaceable treasures. Of course this would cost money, but I would rather contribute some of my tax dollars to the preservation of our cultural heritage than to building more weapons. Artists could be encouraged to do what Prince did and get control of their masters or at least have stipulations that they be stored and backed up properly. There must be people in the music business who if they are aware of how dire the situation is regarding preservation, would gladly spearhead the drive to save our cultural heritage. Martin Scorsese you must have a counterpart in the music world as far as saving these treasures goes. Just a thought.
15
@Humanbeing
How do they decide what are "irreplacable treasures" . It takes decades for collective nostalgia to filter relatively few recordings from the countless forgotten, and by then those in demand are copied and the forgotten are forgotten. Can't save everything on the off chance of a future revival.
"You may as well try and catch the wind"
2
This was a good article. As a matter of fact, one the better ones about music that I have read in a while. I did not know about "The Prince Teddy Album". You might call the music "hip" or "rocking" soul. I thought he sounded a little like Terry Kath. You raise an interesting question - how many vinyl copies of this album exist? I make a guess of 50. If there were only (let's say) 5, I don't think you could buy it for $75. That is, of course, just a guess. This could be the next collecting quest - obtaining the entire AVI catalog!
3
The same thing happened at the vault of Atlantic Records. I believe it occured in the late seventies. Priceless recordings by John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Ray Charles, among many others, were lost.
The vaults of record companies don’t seem to be managed very well. A few years ago, a 14-disc set of live recordings by the band Yes was released, entirely compiled using master tapes that had been found by accident.
7
Thanks for the great article Jody. I remember hearing about this when it happened, hearing the whispers of what actually happened and then reading the press releases and being resigned to accepting the uncertainty of what was lost. In many ways it’s comforting to have some semblance of closure from the article and a cautionary call for action.
There are a lot of organizations racing against the degradation and obsolescence of media, including the Council on Library and Information Resources, NEH, NEA, the Association of Recorded Sound Collections, the International Association of Audiovisual Archives, the National Recording Preservation Board, and many independent institutions, businesses, and organizations.
Then there are the repair technicians that have not retired so they can build and service antiquated machines for as long as possible so preservation work can be carried out. Not even touching on the need for accurate description. None of this is a particularly profitable pursuit, as labels know from certain elements of the back catalog.
Because of often not being profitable, there is the tension between time and quality and cost which makes the work not for faint of heart. But are people ready to fund it in this time of plural crisis beyond Jack White, David Packard, and Steven Spielberg (and others). I hope so, and I hope your article helps call people to action, because there are more professionals ready to work than there is sustained funding for.
16
How many of you have irreplaceable family photos on a single hard drive?
Back them up! Online, flash drive, preferably both.
7
Perhaps also notable, is the loss of any conversations or spoken notes that may have been captured. In the studio there is plenty of back and forth between artists, discussing previous or upcoming takes, discussion between artists and the booth (engineers, producers, managers, girlfriends/boyfriends), or even just banter. it can be very enlightening documentary material from a music history and production standpoint, as well as lend insight into just what was going on at the time (In and out of the studio). You can learn about processes, creative and technical, personal interaction, and idea generation. hearing a bad take might be as instructive as hearing the final take. Sometimes, much of a song's final form is wrought during the recording process. Not all, or maybe not even even most of those conversations, would be captured (tape was super expensive - and even later (until recently, really) digital real estate was fairly precious). But still, much might have been gleaned from the spaces between the takes. And worse yet, little, if any of that would have made it onto the copies or samples that were created for release and still exist. So what little there might have been might truly be gone forever.
13
The fire was a catastrophe for any era. And gross negligence by UMG. That it occurred in 2008, well in to the internet era, makes the breach of duty by Universal more egregious.
Now it is common knowledge that content is king. Intellectual property is an asset. For instance, perhaps some of these lesser-known recordings could have been sampled, or turned into a symphony. A snippet of an obscure riff by Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly could be a ringtone. There are countless examples of potential revenue.
Content is like money in the bank. Not to mention priceless artistry.
Thus, husbandry of these tangible intellectual properties is more than a little important. It makes you wonder what big decisions these Hollywood suits are making all day.
When I began reading this, I thought of Lamar Hunt's SubTropolis storage facility outside Kansas City. Then they mentioned the mine in Butler, Pennsylvania. Same thing, except smaller. It is used by both the federal government and entities like the Branded Entertainment Network.
Hence, it was foreseeable to the suits that something very bad could happen, and be prevented. A disaster that could have been avoided with a small capital expenditure for moving and storage.
8
@Wordsworth from Wadsworth
Richard Carpenter said years ago that all the original masters to "The Carpenter's" were destroyed in that fire as well as "Countless other materials from other artist".
1
The consolidation of media in the last 30-40 years has this as an unfortunate side effect. A great number of eggs in one basket.
Music used to be a live experience only, and if it was written down and orchestrated, there were similar preservation issues with the sheet music. But by about 60-70 years ago, some music was only possible by using technological means of multi tracking and other uses of the studio as an instrument. A piece of music was now popularly bound to a specific realization of it, even if different groups 'covered' it.
Even considering the huge amount of recorded music available, it's hard to conceive the numerical vastness of unavailable recordings, and the vastness of unrecorded music worldwide, and even unrealized music.
This particular loss hurts because we know many of the artists whose works are gone, works that can't be realized again, and certainly not by the original artists.
9
This is part of a recurring theme that has been going on for decades: lost masters, lost film prints, etc.
Is it because ultimately these are work products of for-profit companies? Think of how you treat your work archives (if you even have any?)
Instead of just having a mindset of "storage for licensing deals", and the inevitable obliqueness that comes from the passing of hands and employees --it is time to acknowledge that these are cultural timestamps and windows into American history, and organized and archived with more care and and eye toward the future.
But studios and labels seem innately allergic to opening their vaults, for fear of loss, which is enormously ironic. But if they can't do it in house we need to develop better mechanisms for outside archiving.
11
This is an extraordinarily fine article on a topic that’s vitally important to me as a lover of old music and great sound. It’s deeply researched, it explains esoteric information with great clarity, and it contextualizes a huge amount of data with insight and emotion. This is just what I want to support with my Times subscription — genuine journalism. Excellent work.
60
"The rise of Napster and file sharing in the early 2000s decimated the music business; as recently as 2015, the industry was widely judged to have been broken by digital piracy."
Way to perpetuate that myth, not least by the use of that idiotically, deceptively over-the-top name for copyright infringement.
The still-WILDLY-wealthy recording cartel, nor their ability to preserve songs, wasn't broken by copiers any more than Aereo hurt over-the-air TV—and indeed VERY much the contrary, as YouTube vids and shared MP3s (and, increasingly, Sane formats like Vorbis and FLAC) are the ONLY way to find some today. What does hurt the cartel is their own desperate need to attack copiers and hide their songs behind tracker-swamped "streaming" services like Spotify and Pandora, just as OTA TV is so desperate to hide their broadcasts behind the fragmented streaming cartel of Apple TV, Roku, and the like.
As Rihanna pleads "Please don't stop the music!", the cartel she works for does everything they can to abuse and smother her and others' work. Perhaps she'll realize that and leave the cartel to share songs for free while charging to attend live outings...or maybe she'll continue to love the way they lie.
6
The level of greed, strategic short-sightedness and and just plain incompetence portrayed at UMG & NBCU is stunning. Since when is a glorified TuffShed a "vault"? This is what happens when Wall Street and bean-counters run corporations.
11
So many artists who first had to contend with terrible contracts that left many of them penniless in the end. And now to find their original works were left to rot as well, after having every possible penny sucked out of them. Wow. So for those broken artists still alive, I assume this means, no Master = no more contract.. Which is why Universal wanted to keep this quiet.
16
My takeaway is we are lucky to have had the archives for so long and backed up as much as we did, since it all goes away. Recorded media, especially magnetic tape, is ephemeral.
The article hyped the tragedy and cover-up but never mentioned the elephant in the room: life span of magnetic tape. Even under perfect conditions and best quality tape, tape deteriorates pretty fast. Searching around I found forty years the upper limit, for the best tape under optimal storage conditions. Fire in 2008, means everything before 1968 was going the way of the buffalo and needed to be transferred to fresh media a long time ago already. The Council on Library and Information recommends 10-20 years max before transfer from magnetic tape
10
Heartbreaking.
6
These original masters were created using equipment as much as 70 years old, on organic acetate magnetic tapes. There was undoubtedly distortion and sonci limitations on the originals, and time is not kind to acetate tape.
I would hope that anything of value was transcribed to digital using the finest analog to digital encoders available. And the resultant digital files then stored on multiple servers and digital vaults. Once digitized, the resultant files are readily reproduced, and do not deteriorate.
I briefly belonged to a amateur stereo enthusiast group that claimed it could hear differences in reproduced music that could not be objectively measured. These people, in their quest for perfect reproduction, fell victim to sales of interconnect cables and power extension cords priced in the thousands of dollars. I am sure these people would not agree with my assertion that a superb digital copy is a forever copy, as perfect as it is going to get.
7
As a musician and recording engineer, I found this article profoundly depressing and infuriating. The neglect and disregard for these recordings by their corporate owners is sickening.
And it’s another aspect of the root problem of the music and many other businesses. Acquisition after acquisition have led to concentration to the point that all the assets (and distribution) are in the hands of a few corporations that care more for their shareholders than their artists.
Why not? The benefit for the few to the detriment of the many is what American business is all about.
32
A total and terrible tragedy. I didn't have the heart to finish the article past the long list of artists affected. What it very clearly DOES mean, is that "pressings" incorporating any new technology beyond what we already posses, can never be derived from these masters, only from an inferior and derivative source, and will unlikely ever improve materially beyond what we already now possess.
It truly IS the day the music died, not just for one, but for many. Finally, it does speak to the dangers of conglomeration, as many of the subsidiary labels were later acquired by UMG, and they must for many decades have been housed elsewhere. Another "all the eggs in one basket" scenario and we are all infinitely poorer for it.
9
This is so dismaying. And yet utterly unsurprising. We have no shared sense of the true value of our cultural heritage... and so it is left to corporations to exploit. And these are the consequences we now have to endure.
As an artist who’s works were likely lost (recent requests to access materials were mysteriously rebuffed) I share the authors instinct to somehow find a higher and more accountable authority to manage these priceless artifacts.
17
This epic fire certainly was a loss; it also echoes a loss some of us boomers feel a bit closer to home. To those of us who have lived through half the past century, it seems like the greater our technological capacity to archive music, the less we have been able to save or share it on an individual human level. Fireproof museums are now necessary if we want to assure that we don't lose it on a cultural level. One hopes their archives would not be only digital, but allow touching and experiencing the artifacts, other than through a screen or VR.
My parents had a kitchen radio with tubes - on which their favorite songs (and ball games) played frequently enough, and without overweening commercial interruptions, for the whole family to know all the lyrics and sing along. That radio had amazing fidelity. The only playback device in the house during my youth was a self-contained box with turntable and speaker for double sided 45's. I can still recall some of the titles, tunes, lyrics and labels, though they are long gone.
Having lived from that era through LP's, 8-track, cassettes, a Victrola, CD's, earbuds and Sirius, I've lost my entire collection, many times over. The "music" I hear today is not, to me, worth saving. Having less music, of real quality, really was so much more. It lent a dimension of shared joy and often humor to our lives. There really is no replacement, just more "choices" in the Tower of Babel we live in today. I miss the music.
15
@Quite Contrary
I would rather be singing songs with my grandparents at the piano again than own every recording ever made
I worked briefly at Universal. Awful job. If I know them, it must have cost an extra 20 bucks to make sure everything would have been safe and looked after. But I'm sure they couldn't take that out of the talent-less executive travel budget. They sure didn't put it on the screen either.
11
Have many friends and colleagues who've worked at Universal over the years, and you're absolutely right. For one thing, the way they've carved up the historic back lot into an amusement park (even tearing down Lon Chaney's 1925 Phantom of the Opera stage) proves that. That they allowed this tragedy to happen is not careless, it's typical.
Uncle Karl Laemmle must be spinning in his grave.
8
I remember hearing about the fire, but I bought into the spin at the time. I never knew that Steely Dan, one of the most perfectionist popular bands of the recording age lost material there. How sad! It's too bad these things weren't stored in a real vault with fire protection as well as climate control. A very interesting and poignant article, good work!
10
Hi Jody - I'm so glad you wrote this article. You were right "Nobody Knows". I have not heard anything about this disaster, that's what it is a disaster. You can never get back history which was destroyed. This is terrible especially when you consider how some of those old masters were acquired. Another sad fact is that my step-fathers masters were probably amongst the Chess Records masters that were destroyed. He is the last living founder of the gospel group - The Violinares. His health is failing and I would dare not divulge this information to him.
Thanks for letting the "truth" come out. This article will be shares with the other music aficionados in my family.
73
@AnnieB
Yes it's a disaster and yet, each time one is at a live performance it disappears even as the hands clasp and clap try to hold onto something of the experience. It's very sad to lose these things and sadder, I think, is that people count on recordings so much for those dead records are what compete with and replace today's living performers' careers. More people choose recordings over live performances and that's killing musical art more than a fire.
8
The Sherman Grinberg Film Library in Los Angeles is digitizing tens of millions of feet (over 6,000 hours) of classic 35mm black and white nitrate newsreels from 1896 to 1957 to 4K resolution, at private expense, to preserve it for posterity. You can see digital film clips some of the results in low resolution (standard definition) at www.shermangrinberg.com.
7
“You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone . . .” Joni Mitchell
42
i hope all the artists sue. this would be some class action lawsuit. why aren't the lawyers all over this? what a loss for humanity! As i was reading this, i could hear all the music in my head. a lesson learned for the artists, get your masters! Good for Prince, he knew what was at stake. In the rush to get your songs out there, pay attention to your contracts. Good for Tom Petty also, he knew.
8
This is so sad. Short term thinking, greed and cultural ignorance rule.
4
@Jess Yes, well, this is the United States of America, after all. "We lead the way in apathy!"
3
To use the misquote attributed to Hunter Thompson;
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
50
What a horrible loss of American history.
9
There is another issue of retaining audio information and that is digitalization. Sound comes into our ears as continuous waves. This is described as a sinusoidal or analog signal. It can be divided upon in unlimited points. Digital signals are not continuous. They are discrete signals, made up of numerous but single impulses. Converting an analog to a digital signal means taking only some evenly spaced samples of the analog signal and making them as equivalents to the analog at those points. Once such a sample is made, it can never be used to restore the original analog signal and it can never be used to create a finer sampled signal from the original. An analog signal can be made from this digital version but it’s like taking a series of dots and joining then by the closest fit drawn lines.
Recording music digitally will never be as good as analog recordings.
8
@Casual Observer
My comment here does not diminish this terrible loss of masters and original tapes, but the technical content of your comment is incorrect. Without going into the technical details, please look into "Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem," which defines the digital sampling rate required to capture all the information contained in a given analog signal. This is not based on opinion, as the theorem is backed by an established mathematical proof.
I have a huge analog collection, cannot stand mp3s (a lossy format), acknowledge the limitations of poor digital re-mastering and poor 'analog to digital'/'digital to analog' converters, but it is a mythology that analog signals cannot be accurately reproduced in the digital domain.
P.S. The loss of this source material is inexcusable. The monopolies controlling the music industry have let our culture and society down in countless ways.
15
As much as I prefer analog this description of digitalization really isn’t accurate!
2
@Casual Observer This is a very common misunderstanding of how sampling works, depending on how it is done. It is not, however, indicative of reality.
Using the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem properly, the entire continuous-time signal is captured. All of it, not at all analogous to "taking a series of dots and joining them by the closest fit drawn lines," it is taking a series of dots and finding the next, immediately adjacent dot, with no connective line needed.
It is difficult to wrap one's mind around (this is not to be patronizing: I struggle with it) but it is the truth.
Digital reproduction is and has been capable of perfect reproduction of analogue signals.
Whether it has been properly used to do so is a separate issue...
7
Another tragedy is how the our society discards talented people like the archivist Randy Aronson. So much experience and knowledge wasted.
49
Perhaps this catastrophic loss contrasts to the MGM archive that got buried on a golf course?
1
If the recording industry had spent on preservation a fraction of the money it wasted on fighting the likes of Napster and going after some random teenagers sharing pirated music, this would not have happened.
At the same time, this reads like a cautionary tale about all the corporate consolidation.
18
Glad he finally got to explaining why the master is different from / superior to a copy. But were there or can there be copies of the master? Wouldn't the families of the artists have copies of the masters? Or can there only be one copy of a master? I see how changing formats can lose detail but can't u=you make a 100% true copy of a master? Like with a movie. Is there only one true copy? Or are copies of the original in the same format 100% true copies? I wish he had explained this in the beginning.
I have a collection of 5,000 + "78rpm" (not all lacquer discs were recorded at that speed) collected by my late father. They span from the early 20th century, e.g., 1906 to the 1950's. I have the hardware and software technology to digitally transcribe and restore them. It is a very time intensive process. I would like to be able to share the restorations but the attitude of the recording copyright conglomerates makes that very difficult. I don't even attempt to place anything from the 1940's or later online generally. Even with recordings from the teens, 20's and 30's, placing them on YouTube ensures a copyright challenge, a dog-in-the-manger knee jerk reaction from such as UMG to ANY musical content posted online. I was able to place a small number on YouTube (the Synoptic Designs channel) but gave up because of the hassle of having to respond to claims of copyright infringement. I have had better success with SoundCloud (Synoptic Designs Studio) but that venue reaches a much smaller audience. None of the restored recordings posted on that venue have been challenged. I would like to suggest to Ms. Rosen that she consider doing an article on the copyright mafia crushing small YouTube channels. Even though copyright law allows "fair use". e.g., short excerpts, even playing four chords of a popular song on a guitar will result in the poster receiving a copyright strike and likely loosing any income from his or her channel.
9
@Dav Mar, keep fighting! The work you're doing may actually be a more important public service than any of us formerly realized.
Related to this, as I read Jody's article, I was struck by the thought that those of us with large and possibly obscure collections should reconsider what we do with the vinyl after digitization. In the past, if I couldn't donate or resell, I repurposed or sent to landfill. It's a pain for collectors who don't play LPs much anymore to retain these libraries, but in the wake of this story, we each may need to reconsider the value of some of our old analog copies and the small role we may each be able to play in preserving the story.
3
As a huge Elvis Presley fan, a story like this is not surprising. If you can believe it, RCA destroyed nearly all of Elvis' outtakes from 1954-1958 in a vault clean-out in 1959. They kept the master tapes but outtakes were considered too expensive to store. These included the precious Sun Records outtakes Sam Phillips had sent RCA when it purchased its contract in 1955. The Billboard article referenced in the story is worth reading and will break your heart even more.
RCA/BMG, like other smarty record companies, eventually hired uber fans, such Ernst Jorgensen, to do a though review of its Elvis tapes (totals over 4,000 tapes). Jorgensen tracked downed many "lost" tapes by reviewing shipping records and making deals with folks holding missing tapes. Thank God!
8
I remember this fire distinctly.
Living near Universal Studios at the time, I remember the black plumes of smoke bellowing, and that distinctive acrid smell plastic makes when its burning.
So saddened to hear of all of the great recordings that were lost.
Just sad.
6
This makes me wonder about the safety of the Seed Bank, where seeds of plants are kept that insure that they are secure in case of extinction.
None of this is surprising of the music industry well known for being run by shysters and corporate types that have no regard for the art, only what profit can be made. Also not surprising they never noticed the financial loss until much later when they could have profited again.
5
Appears Universal was too cheap to pay someone a couple hours overtime to perform fire watch after the shift when workers were using cutting torches. Kind of like at Notre-Dame isn't it?
6
This is such a terribly sad and disturbing story. But Jody Rosen's article is amazing. This is journalism at its best. As a musician and an author involved with music research I am inspired by his work here. I'm so curious to know more about what kind of preparation and time went into this incredible article that covers so many fascinating and upsetting sides of this horrific story.
25
Universal should be held liable for neglectful handling of this priceless archive material and for the lies they passed on to the media about the extent of the damage. This is a tragedy.
6
In the beginning our ' music' was ' recorded' by memory.
The notion that the survival of human musical artistic forms is primarily dependent upon changing forms of recording technology is naively ignorant about the dynamic evolutionary creative artistic nature of music.
There are no ' master' copies of human artistic musical expression. Over time every musical artist masters and reinterprets their craft.
2
@Blackmamba
Music is in our DNA ! Recordings are fun, but we can never lose music.
1
With the inadvertent destruction of the masters, the labels' exploitation of these artist can be considered complete.
I'm certain much more care was taken to protect the original contracts and accounting documents.
18
Ok, this question begs to be asked... Why wasn't the "vault" storage facility fireproofed if t was so valuable? Let me guess... could greed be the answer, where UMG's exec's valued its content, but not the cost of fireproofing its content?
6
@Ron The very question I kept asking myself. Greed & short-sightedness.
4
One of the best music articles I've read, you can feel the writers love and passion for music and what this history lost meant. The record companies have a cash cow they don't cherish. Embarrassing.
12
Is there an inventory of the particular masters that have been destroyed? Have any of those masters been released as "remixed/remastered from the original source" since 2008?
4
Corporations are not people, they are collections of people. The sum of all those people makes an entity that is orders of magnitude worse than any individual human being. and it magnifies the worst characteristics of its leadership the way a small lever articulates a large boom. This disaster is Exhibit A to such a claim.
Yes, human people organized together under a corporate charter and serving under the leadership of a few executives made this happen, and while we cannot reasonably hold individual humans responsible, we can, apparently, single out the corporate person for corrective punishment, and we should do so with impunity.
1
The idea of archiving being a cost center is depressing. Especially since UMG and other media companies are gifted the ability to make money from music publishing by us, the public.
Through copyright law, we grant massive monopoly power to media companies for very long periods of time, during which copyright owners make a great deal of money.
In return, we deserve extensions to copyright law that oblige the owners of copyrighted material to take precautions to archive original recordings during the timeframe they are gifted by us, so as to ensure these works can ultimately enter the public domain and become our collectively shared and publicly-owned cultural wealth.
7
As a fan of music of all types, I am literally sick to my stomach as I read this. Much of the "golden age" of modern music, no matter what genre, is now gone, simply gone, irretrievable to future advancements in sound technology. How this was not made a bigger deal at the time is unconscionable. But thank you for uncovering the story that lay hidden under the ashes for the last decade.
12
Millions of us have drowned our sorrows, not so much in a bottle but rather to the tunes of some of these masters - for it is "they," the musicians, who are the masters. We dug out the grooves in their LP's. We found the salve through their souls. We patched the dents to our armor with their lyrics. Whether it was a teenage breakup, a middle-aged divorce or elderly losses that left us in need, at least one of these musicians had already been there before us and found a way to express and manage it all through their music. The least the masters could have expected in return was responsible stewardship of their work for future followers. We go to a museum to see an original piece of art; looking at a digital shadow copy on the Internet is no replacement. There musical artists also deserved that most fundamental show of respect.
15
I’ve seen the cavalier attitude companies take with masters firsthand. I had the opportunity to work with a small company in St Louis years ago who was digitizing all the masters for one of the largest comic book companies. This was painstaking work of putting plastic films onto large flatbed scanners. All manual work. I was amazed that all the 1950s, 1960, and onward copies were there in that small warehouse. There are literally no other copies (besides paper prints most people see) of some of that material.
I made a casual remark that the fire system must be decent since these were plastic inside cardboard sheaths. To my disgust, the manager said the comic book company had declined their offer to upgrade the fire suppression beyond their bare minimum sprinklers. He knew it would not be sufficient to stop any fire since it wasn’t designed for these new racks holding the masters. The comic book company was satisfied with their insurance policy should they all be destroyed in a fire.
Think on that. Someone decided on the monetary value of those comic books in perpetuity and decided it was cheaper to get insurance than put some sprinklers in or, better yet, halon systems which were easily done in this location. The greed and disregard for cultural legacy these companies show is stunning. It is only a matter of time before we do lose much of our past. It’ll be cheaper than saving it.
16
I'm staggered and heartbroken. I had no idea of the depth of our loss. I am deeply grateful to Jody Rosen for his heroic effort to explore the extent of tragedy and convey it to us.
21
I have original vinyl copies of many of the performances mentioned in the article as well as several reel tapes of the material. As Michael Fremer says in his email, these are now true archival copies of the lost masters - and will be treated as even greater treasures. The entire story saddens me greatly.
10
Transferring a master tape to digital doesn’t mean the tape can then be discarded. Details like ensuring proper tape head alignment and setting up accurate Dolby decoding often need to be painstakingly adjusted differently on each tape before playback. Most audiophile reissue companies do their own tape transfers for these reasons. Using someone else’s tape transfers from before the 2008 UMe blaze may be better than nothing, but would likely leave a lot to be desired in terms of sonics, especially as technology improves over time.
5
A beautifully written account. Thank you Jody Rosen!
What irony that the recording industry went to such lengths to defend its intellectual property from cheap digital copies, yet they failed to properly secure their own bank of recording treasures.
49
The writer repeats, unquestioningly, a common notion that seems highly debatable: "The rise of Napster and file sharing in the early 2000s decimated the music business." In reality, the music business suffered from several ills at the turn of the century, many of them of its own making, including a reluctance to embrace online music services and the failure to develop catalog artists during the previous two decades, while instead focusing on the instant gratification of one-hit wonders and teen pop.
At the same time, MTV had turned away from music programming, radio had become more conservative than ever, and the sweet spot of music market — teens and college-age listeners — were shifting their spending to electronics, cell phones, sneakers and video games. File-sharing, at a time when most consumers hadn't yet subscribed to broadband, was only a small portion of the trouble the music industry faced; in fact, studies at the time showed that the heaviest downloaders of free music were also the biggest purchasers of music. Blaming the brief existence of Napster for "decimating" the business is a canard and a massive overstatement of its impact.
Otherwise I should add that this is a great (if massively depressing) article.
29
The United States could be a very good place to preserve things like these abundant and rich archival materials. The richest nation in history with the most secure civilization in history. But we allow people entirely focused on making money to the extent that nothing has priority over doing so to preserve important archives. It’s illogical.
15
@Casual Observer I remember working at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in the mid-80's and at that time the old explosive nitrate films belonging to the National Film Archive were stored in a weapons bunker on the base. Our current President and his party have little to no interest in celebrating and preserving culture or the arts. I bet funding for our National Film archive is on the chopping block, if it hasn't already been eliminated.....
4
@Casual Observer,
Businesses exist solely to make money - it is nonsensical to pretend that they care about anything else - and if something does not show profit (or reduce loss) in the present quarter, the corporation does not care about it. And bigger the corporation, the less it cares about non-profit goals. Seems like a difficult lesson for many to learn, and yes, illogical.
1
People make fun of audiophiles and record collectors, but we've got what no one else has or can get: pristine records, cut on tube equipment 50 or 60 years ago when the master was fresh. Spend a few thousand bucks on a turntable and a cartridge, and you're just about listening to the master tape.....that was lost many years ago.
16
@Jonathan
Who makes fun of audiophiles and record collectors? I've been around a long time, am deep into music, and have never heard anyone do that. Frankly, given the place music has in our culture my sense is folks like you are admired.
3
@W. Freen - It probably has something to do with the $10K phono cartridges and $45K turntables, or maybe it's the $6421 some bidder paid for an important original Blue Note on eBay. Ordinary people cannot let this pass as a harmless hobby.
4
@Jonathan I make fun of myself on occasion when I reflect on my lifelong 50+ year devotion to record / music collecting, as well as the treasure I have expended over the years on equipment & sundry ephemera. And always have a great time in the process of doing precisely this!
1
This is a heartbreaking read about a cultural loss of monumental and likely incalculable value. The example given toward the end of obscure artists like Nick Drake is a personal favorite anecdote. I'll add a few others that come to mind: The folk-rock artist Sixto Rodriquez, an American who recordings ranked in important alongside The Beatles the South African counterculture. Another is Donnie and Joe Emerson, a pair of teenagers from rural Washington State who recorded some achingly beautiful ballads in the late 1970s which emerged from total obscurity only recently.
There's an even better example from the world of Classical Music: Antonio Vivaldi's works were largely ignored for more than a century until they were rediscovered in a scholarly inquiry. What considered unworthy and commercially unviable in one era may become a masterpiece in another. We may never ever know the value of the music lost on this day, and that should make us as a society stop and think and resolve to act.
26
I am sharing this extraordinary story today with many of the thousands of great musical artists in all genres who I have worked with along with their managers. I hope UMG faces massive lawsuits, and that this spurs a sea change in the way music and musicians are treated. Kudos and thanks to Jody Rosen.
18
Lossless digital audio existed in 2008. I hope Universal was smart enough to have offsite digital backups. Hopefully they would also have offsite physical backup of the next generation of recordings if they adhered to standard best backup practices.
1
@Cynistrategus Lossless means without compression. The issue being discussed is the loss of analog tapes which digital audio (lossless or not) can never replace. The simplest way to explain it is that analog audio is the equivalent of a hand drawn curved line. Digital audio is different in that it is sampled. The higher the sampling rate the closer it is to analog, but it can never equal it. To most listeners it means nothing, but those who listen to albums there is a distinct difference.
1
This is an incredibly devastating account of the worst archival accident in music history. It's sad, horrible, and if you care at all about music and preservation, it will ruin your day. It might ruin your month. Nevertheless it is essential reading and a cautionary tale which should be a clarion call for the importance of archival storage, archival procedures, and most importantly the archivists and their role in preserving our cultural heritage. Thanks to people like Andy Zax who continue to make this their life's work.
133
@Cal Zone! Don't forget the loss of Mozart's manuscript scores for his Clarinet Concerto and Clarinet Quintet! All we have are recreations from second hand sources. Blame Stadler!
4
For some reason my mother took me to see Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bill Haley and the Comets at War Memorial Auditorium in my home town of Ft. Lauderdale when I was an mere stripling of 8 years old.
Since then rock and roll has been my spiritual home. This news is devastating and disgusting.
Thanks be to God I didn't see Exile or London Calling mentioned in the piece.
5
Thanks for the article. Maybe a small fee could be attached to each download or CD /Album sale to preserve the archives.
I often wondered who paid to store nuclear waste, turns out there is a small fee included with each megawatt generated that is collected somewhere in the supply chain that goes toward waste storage. If we value nuclear waste storage so much can’t we also see the value of storing musical archives. Also, what is the difference between a book and a recording, I guess it’s the recording masters we are talking about. But the Library of Congress stores a copy of books, even bad , unpopular books right? I wonder where the original manuscripts are kept ? I guess the writer retains them? That processes has its own problems... decentralized storage and lack of access to the authors home! But wouldn’t it be cool to view the authors original notes and changes to their literary works.
Video archiving of concert footage also has its problems , maybe not from deteriorating quality but from lack of vision. Many of the videos from artists I have seen are created for “entertainment”, not as documentaries. A video of Jimi Hendrix playing at Woodstock has some nice shots of Jimi’s face, bandana and the crowds, but little of his magical guitar playing, fingering and picking technique, chord voicing, riffs , solos. It seems in video archiving clips of guitar players faces we have lost the most critical component: how did they actually play the guitar?
4
@S As for adding a small fee........... the biz is run by hustlers. They will pocket such.
1
I am stunned at the enormity of the losses and equally stunned and dismayed by the dismissively, casual, cavalier attitude of all of those who are ultimately responsible and now even more irresponsible.
Hopefully songwriters, singers, and musicians will insist in future contracts that preservation is legally required and will demand that so-called vaults are organized, maintained and preserved for future generations.
To the narrow minded and poorly informed who believed that film preservation was more important than music, kindly consider that without sound tracks much film is useless. I wonder what Disney does to guarantee preservation of the contents of its vaults?
Maybe too its time to consider legislation that defines preservation of even private national treasures.
14
This is a beautifully written piece, and the writer’s passion comes pouring out. Sigh. Reading it reminded me of my days as a “go-fer” for a midtown NY recording studio. One day, I was sent on a mission to our outer borough offices to try to locate some requested master recordings. After an hour or so of digging around a pile of unlabeled cartons stuffed into warehouse shelves and stacked, unprotected, on the floor, I struck paydirt — a stack of Duke Ellington masters that I hand-delivered to his son, Mercer Ellington. Hopefully, Mercer did a better job of protecting them than my employer did.
56
Undoubtedly an irretrievable loss ... but the author does not fully explain that analog tape masters almost unavoidably age to the point of uselessness ... faster than oil paintings for instance ... about as fast as silver based photographic prints ... basically, there is no "forever" available to the oxide and tape physical structure, even under extremely best archival practice.
That being the case, "copying" to digital is the best long term option for analog based recordings. "Data" can theoretically be preserved indefinitely, especially since copies of copies are not technically copies at all, they are just clones in the true sense. And therefore redundant "masters" are possible, which as anyone who's job is to diminish fault tolerance can tell you is the only true way to preserve.
also: "But it wasn’t well inventoried. It was hard to sell a return-on-investment on an inventory" ...
Another way of looking at the problem would be to realize that if, for instance, Atlantic Records had gone out of business (just to use a hypothetical) because they devoted lets say 20% of their income stream to maintaining better archives, you might not have ever had half the artists that did surface through that label. IE - no Re Re ... just saying
@Fred Mueller, silver based photographic prints can last well over a century with proper basic care.
3
"Consider the lilies of the field, they do not work, they do not spin, yet I tell you, neither Solomon in all his splendor was not attired like one of them... and yet here today and tomorrow thrown upon the stove."(Matthew 6.28-30) " How very fragile are the precious things in our lives and history. The world was horrified when ISIS destroyed World Cultural Heritage Sites in Syria and many Syrians hid many artifacts and library items from ISIS. The world should be equally horrified at the loss of 175K masters and 500K songs! T Norris is right, "the entertainment industry knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." I hope "A-Way-Back Machine" is invented in the near future to recover those lost masters, but in lieu of that I hope the science of audio and recording engineering improves. Great informative article.
5
This is depressing. Hopefully Apple Records has The Beatles masters in fire proof storage. That would be a huge loss if they ever got damaged.
4
@susan Apple has most likely done that already. Indeed, their tapes were likely digitized in the mid-2000s when they re-released their albums in mono and stereo boxes.
That said, as far as back the mid-1980s, we know that EMI had destroyed the stereo master of "She Loves You" (only the mono version is available) and the first version of "Love Me Do" with Ringo on drums (and first released in the UK in 1962). Andy White plays drums on the version you are familiar with.
3
@susan The Beatles' multi-track masters have long since been digitized at extremely high resolution. I'm certain that the session tapes and subsequent mix-downs are treated like the Crown Jewels that they are. But it's the digital versions that will be used going forward for any subsequent releases of Beatles material.
2
You know how nature uses fire to clear an area so new growth can take place?
And how conservative conservationists are obsessed with maintaining the status quo? ('scuse the British pun)
Well at the risk of sounding a bit 'Carlinesque', I am excited to hear that there has been some space created for up and coming artists. (And the oldies were not always the goodies) (No British pun intended this time..)
This is an extremely callous and shallow view. I don't believe anyone would argue the fact that not all "old" music is classic (see: "Sugar Sugar" by The Archies), however anyone who summarily dismisses the likes of Coltrane, Basie, Armstrong, & Calloway as pillars of Jazz, or Buddy Holly, The Mamas & Papas, Elton John, & Elvis Pressley, etc. as precursors of Pop & Rock "n" Roll, or artists like Muddy Waters, Billie Holiday & their ilk as essential to Blues, is truly ignorant of how today's music (or what passes for it) came into our culture.
Don't misunderstand me: If you like your music over-produced, over-engineered, fully synthesized, and completely auto-tuned, that's great; but for those of us who appreciate music's history, & that genres beget genres, well, we understand how important the loss of these masters are. It's why those that appreciate "MUSIC" jump at the chance to get a remastered copy of any John Coltrane album, or the remasterd "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." It's why my kids, who, when I die, want very little of mt "stuff," have, for years, been arguing as to who gets which of my over 600 (vinyl) albums.
That these masters are gone is as much a tragedy as would be the loss of any great art form - but it's OK if you don't agree. Just don't be so arrogant as to dismiss it as simply a relic of the past with no intrinsic value. Great music, like any great art, defines who we are by telling us where we came from.
8
"Sugar Sugar" by The Archies is a Summer Classic.
2
It is painfully sad sometimes when we are reminded that immortality is hubris and not for us or our bits and pieces.
2
From the corporate overlords I hear this common refrain: “Not all risks are worth mitigating and many risks cannot be mitigated.” That near-tautology often hides a sad truth: Often no one has figured out the true cost and likelihood of what might be lost...and what really needs protection. For many years I have overseen the backup of software “aka software escrow” at IRon Mountain (mentioned in this article as an oft-used repository of Intellectual Property). Not to shill for IRM, but they take their IP vaulting seriously...however, they generally don’t care what you store, aka GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). Merely putting stuff into safer storage isn’t a long-term panacea. There’s lots of ways to store music these days, but analog-on-tape is simply an inferior method provided you have knowledgeable digital recording / transcribing engineers (I’m thinking Steve Hoffman, et.al.). Once you have a clean, jitter-free digital copy of a musical release at a high sampling and bit depth (like 192k/24bits) you can copy it anywhere and it will never degrade (unlike analog tapes). However, good transcriptions of analog classics into high-quality digital take time, money, and talent...so one needs to be selective. Thoughtlessly dumping analog into digital is likely GIGO...and once you’ve lost that analog master it’s all over...but those analog masters, unlike fine Bordeaux, don’t get better with age. That is, know what’s in inventory and protect the family jewels NOW.
3
Another even sadder part of this story is that because the way culture is or isn’t “taught”, most young people have no idea who Chuck Berry or John Coltrane are. They might know the Beatles if you are lucky.
7
The sky is crying and the tears are running down the street - Elmore James
8
If the whereabouts of missing masters are unknown perhaps the author could contact mastering consultant Steve Hoffman, formerly of MCA. Rumor has it Steve could be helpful.
5
@william
You may be right. But what went missing when he was in charge is documented in MCA files, and in comparison it is minimal.
I am proud I saved a few Buddy Holly masters before the fire (and issued them legally in the UK). Universal have used these since without any reference to me.... I hope they are grateful!
1
I cannot believe this (well, actually -yes I can). Having been a musician (and many of those years a professional) for over 40 years I am in shock about this. Many folks just don't seem to understand the magnitude of this loss ! And the disregard for our collective heritage. The willful neglect.
So many already do not know what Movies look like, what music sounds like. They have settled for Video on phones & MP3 audio. Very sad.
"Corporations do not seem to understand that they are also stewards of what's come before." Oh, they understand perfectly fine. And they have been warned more than once by people who knew better. They refused to listen & Greed ruled the day as it does each & every day in this sad sack nation that we have become. Thank you for your article.
89
@Dheep' The strange part is that the CD and DVD era taught the media companies that all of their holdings are valuable assets and since the streaming companies want everything, they're still valuable. You'd think they would have learned that lesson and taken are of these assets.
And for the record Universal Music is owned by Vivendi, a French company, not a U.S. company.
1
@Dheep'
If not for capitalism there wouldn't be modern technology to record the music and there wouldn't be music available to billions.
I accidentally wrote commie instead of Connie
Why didn't the lawyers for the artists write contracts that retained ownership and control of the masters?
I don't think the problem is corporate greed considering the music made from the original masters is so much better than any other form so therefore it is more valuable . The story also says that music made from old masters today is better than that made a generation ago because of better tech
For what it's worth, the Producer's notes to the 2009 Mosaic re-issue of Louis Armstrong's complete 1930s and early 1940s Decca recordings refer to the "devastating fire" (and credit Randy Aronson as a vault researcher for the project). So no secret to those that read producer's notes. Fortunately, most of the recordings in the set were transferred from the original metal masters (either they survived the fire or were used before the fire?). Unfortunately, three sessions including Dexter Gordon and Ella Fitzgerald were lost and had to be transferred from inferior sources. And no, I'm not Ricky Riccardi or Phil Schapp.
4
Thank you, Mr. Rosen, for the most momentous and moving investigation of an artistic and cultural loss that I've read in a very long time.
8
So they stored all this precious material in a building without a fire suppression system - not water sprinklers but one that "seals" the vault area & deprives it of oxygen needed by the flames. (Any people inside would have emergency "space suits" to put on so they could breathe & exit through an airlock. ) Such systems existed way prior to 2008- I saw one in the early 80s.
Are the other vaults protected NOW?
6
It is indeed a shame, but glad no one was hurt and...all things must pass, including you and everyone you know and everything you touched, wore, listened to and looked at. There can be hand-wringing - "NO! NOT AL JOLSON! NOT BUDDY HOLLY!" and such, and, again, it is a shame, but today how many people will be murdered, raped, cheated, abused? How many will die because of inadequate medical care? How many tortured, how many political prisoners rotting, how many people sleeping in cars or under bridges?
Let it be - we have no choice. The recordings are gone and we must move on.
Also, for me personally, I should add - I was never an audiophile. What matters is content. So if we have all of Coltrane and such digitally preserved, I shall listen to that and not care that the megahertz and decibles and dodobirds aren't 100% sonically up to someone's snuff. I listen to music from the teens and 20s, scratchy, tinny and lovely. Just quit adding reverb to Sophie Tucker, please and thank you...
I wonder what affect the loss of the masters will have on the 'copyright' of pre-1972 sound recordings. These recordings are covered by state law, not federal law.
For example, the last I checked, California 653h states that an offense occurs if someone transfers sounds "without the consent of the owner.".
But the owner is defined as "the person who owns the original master recording embodied in the master phonograph record, master disc, master tape, master film or other article..."
Did the studio claim a tax loss on the masters? Do they need to be produced in court to prove ownership?
Other states have similar laws.
1
I was wondering the same
@MNResident
I should note the CLASSICS Act signed into federal law in October 2018 moved these pre-1972 recordings under federal copyright law which doesn't require the existence of a master recording. I suspect this fire help push the need for the law change.
Obviously the destruction of any cultural artifact is a cause for concern, but the long term loss is probably less than meets the eye. The tapes were already without question deteriorating significantly. Audio tape burns very quickly, but it also "burns" slowly, and is not a long-term (century scale) storage medium. Most of these recordings were probably doomed to never be heard again at any usable fidelity, fire or no.
2
I saw the fire from my bedroom window at 5am. It sounded like gunfire. I worked at Universal Studios at the time. It wasn't until I arrived for work that I knew how much was lost.
4
I was the Assistant VP of Iron Mountain in 1983. I worked in the "caves" in Rosendale, NY. One of my favorites things to do on my lunch hour was walk through the CBS vaults and pull the session tapes from legendary albums and read the producer notes. There was no playback, nor would I have been authorized to play the tapes if we had. Records management is "corporate right field" and little is thought of it until backups are needed or storage costs soar.
17
Reminds me of the loss of the works of geniuses through history going back to the losses at the Library of Alexandria. The advantages of bringing together so many great things in one place and then one bad event can destroy huge amounts of irreplaceable things.
It also reminds us that money is not wealth but only a means of exchange. When we mistake it’s real usefulness for the real value of things we can actually dismiss the value of things that money does not represent.
18
This is typical. Not only has this happened to film and music, but to television as well. Many treasures of early television were simply thrown away. There are no known recordings of the first two Super Bowls because they were just discarded.
Perhaps there should be laws governing the disposal of nonsecret IP (e.g., it must be made available for public claim for some time period before being discarded).
3
This story is part of a larger narrative. Those of us who happen to be interested on 20th Century Industrial America know this issue well.
If you are trying to rebuild or restore just about anything, you run into an information void. Most companies did not maintain libraries of their work. Even modest paper ones with blueprints, service manuals or the like.
Even NASA had to send a team to the Smithsonian to measure the lunar module as they could not come up will all the engineering prints.
In a couple of hundred years the items dumped in landfills, recycled, or burned to the ground that were driven by business focus on profits and cutting all money from archiving will rival burning of the Alexandria Library and the resulting loss of the knowledge of antiquity.
7
As painful as it was to read, this story is important and needs to be told. Scratches the surface of the mismanagement of an always dysfunctional industry. I understand that nothing lasts but that still does not take the sting away from this immense loss. Thanks to Jody Rosen for all of your time, effort and care in writing this article and a hats off to Randy Aronson who took the hit the hardest.
30
Thank you NYTimes for this astoundingly detailed article. Its obvious, now, that artists need to take control of their own production, however that can be accomplished.
20
Oh well. Backup, Backup, backup has always applied to paper, film and every copyable thing of value. It's always a hard lesson to learn, especially after a loss, to expect the unthinkable to happen. Copies are just copies, but once they become the only thing there is, being the original is a moot point.
4
What is a back up of original tape? It’s called a copy... and it’s not the same quality as the original. What is the backup of the Mona Lisa called ... a copy, is not THE Mona Lisa.
9
@S I agree. However, having a good copy is better than not having anything.
2
There are so many famous musicians that lost all their tapes of recordings they made. However, I will concentrate on just one - John Coltrane Quartet.
I was very fortunate to have seen this John Coltrane Quartet when they debuted in a Jazz club in the West Village in May 1960. I was on my way to my overseas military assignment and it was such a pleasure to see and hear this new quartet that later made all their records with Impulse Records. I also own many of those original issued records. My favorite is the Coltrane at the Village Vanguard. What a beautiful thundering recordings.
Nice article but sad to know that many recordings were destroyed.
13
As a lifelong lover, and sometimes player, of music, this broke my heart.
12
Glad this finally has been publicized. Bean counter foolishness to save money. Such a tragedy. The best sounding versions of much of this music is on clean vinyl pressings. If you have them you have archival copies. Same group shut down a profitable upstate New York record pressing plant for a one year bottom line bump.
18
This is a sad story, but the loss may not have been as extreme as it seems on the face of it. Many of these old recordings may have already deteriorated beyond repair due to just the passage of time. Audio tape degrades over time just as surely as many other analog media and archivists often have to resort to other material. It could well be that the most accurate representations of a lot of this old material exist on the superb long playing records from the 1950s. Tape print through alone is probably responsible for more damage to early recorded music than fire.
6
@Nick Wheeler If you store a tape "tails out", you still get print-through, but not the faint echo you get if stored "heads out".
That is a gross overstatement!
1
Amazing, and heartbreaking. There’s a book in this article—please write it! (I was surprised, after pages about preservation, to see the writer so cavalierly continuing to drop the needle on his scarce record—go get it digitized, restored, and archived...and then even remastered.)
1
Reading through the list of black musicians alone is heart rending... Coltrane, Ayler, Sun Ra! The loss is incalculable. To those who think digitization will save us I have a pile of horribly remastered CDs to sell you — at a dime a dozen. These were the best produced best sounding most dynamic recordings of music ever made: we needed them to outlast us so that whoever comes next might have a chance to visit Saturn. Then the mega-corporation let it all burn and lied about it. “It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?”
12
Very little is preserved over the passage of time.
4
The horrendous destruction of a major part of our cultural history is grotesque.
Alleging deliberate coverup is important journalism.
"Vault" implies the opposite to say the least.
I commend the newspaper.
4
Amazing article. Incredible research. Wow. Thank you.
9
This is not surprising. How much of early TV's live broadcasts are forever lost as wll as some of the early TV shows, destroyed because studios failed to see the value in saving the material and instead wanted to save money on storage and als re-use the video tape, It is unfortunate that we will not even ever know the magnitude of the loss and also some artists were so obscure that their only body of work existed in the warehouse. The fault of the studios is that if they cannot make a quick buck, immediately, then the material is simply a drag on the bottom line and a liability.
2
I had no idea about the true extent of the loss. Shocking and sad. Thank you for writing this article.
7
Historically, libraries—monastic, academic, public and private research libraries—have assumed responsibility for the preservation of the world’s cultural and intellectual heritage. Corporate greed, reaching its apex in Hollywood and the music industry, has impeded this role by distorting copyright law to preserve studio and publisher profits against the original purpose of the law, which was to create a temporary monopoly on creative works. On their coattails are the giant publishers of scientific research exploiting their monopoly power to extort obscene profits from the universities that produce the research, often at public expense. This article might not awaken executives to voluntarily accept their role in preserving the cultural assets they oversee, but perhaps it will alert artists to take responsibility themselves for ensuring the future of their work when they sign their contracts.
17
Trust. All businesses, all the time.
Our great country and our great economy is built on these firm timeless principles. UMG is just another fine example. What they say is what they do. What they do is what is right.
What's next? Kushner to negotiate a deal?
6
Art comes and goes, people come and go, civilizations come and go, species come and go, planets, stars, galaxies... I wish a pleasant day to all commenters, and thank the author for a wonderful piece of work.
15
It’s still a huge loss. We could try to mitigate the losses, but apparently we don’t.
2
@bill Your personal nihilism does not absolve you, or the rest of us, from our responsibilities to future generations. We must strive to do better. We cannot halt the natural increase in entropy over time, but we can (must?) slow it and even reverse it on small scales of space and time.
4
@Clay The evolution of the universe is nihilism? I have a responsibility to the cosmos to preserve masters of jazz & blues & etc recordings? Nah. No matter where those masterpieces had been stored, they will not be available to Zorxes 7 in the year 20564798.
Well at least the Dead's tapes were elsewhere.
7
The Grateful Dead refused an offer from Microsoft to host their audio archives, instead entrusting them to their longtime label Warner Brothers. Warner, of course, is now another AT&T subsidiary. In hindsight should they have gone with Microsoft?
At least many Deadheads had the presence of mind to record and propagate much of the music themselves. Your Maxell analog cassettes may have degraded but some of us had digital recordings.
2
This article is an example of the Times’ cultural leadership.This is at least the Pentagon Papers of the music business;in fact,it’s about the folly ( stronger word is needed) of putting short-term profit first.”Thank you” seems so inadequate.
48
A terrific article.
The original source,the master ( tape ) is everything.Period.
To this reader,the loss of the Coltrane masters in both the Universal and Atlantic fires is criminal.To realize that the original source of such milestone albums has gone forever ( meaning that what has been released prior to the fires, is as good as it can ever get) is frankly shattering.
Now this might not mean so much to the younger generation who revel in the digital era of convenience and storability but to those who savor true audio excellence and the highest quality it's frankly heartbraking.
64
@Zellickson
No,it's shattering...and as shattering as other monuments of culture and art, lost forever through history.
4
Recently I found a Pathe electrically recorded 78 rpm disc from circa 1931 of Schubert lied the label credited sung by Rudolf Steiner. The World Encyclopedia of Recorded Music lists it, but another copy has never been seen by anyone at the Library Of Congress or the NYPL. Anthroposophists in Dornach are certain it is not the philosopher, but no archive appears to exist to explain exactly who this Rudolf Steiner is.
Calls to Polygram EMI and Warner Brothers remain unanswered as to where ledgers or microfilm containing the history of scheduled recordings at Pathe might exist.
Jolyon S. Hudson of Marlboro Books in London suggests a Rudolphe Steiner who sang at the Trocadero in 1931 for a tradesman's benefit might have recorded 4 sides for Pathe which due to lack of interest were then sent back to the plant and demolished, but the identity of this artist's single disc performance of which nobody has ever seen a copy seems destined to be marked as unknown due to lack of interest.
12
Well that’s pretty punk rock.
3
If this had been in the Post, I imagine the headline would have been “The Day the Music Fried.”
9
This sadden you reading this, you don't like music.
I hope, a lesson learned in putting everything in one place. What a disaster.
3
I have worked on the Universal lot in the past and own a TV post production company in Hollywood.
I got work off that fire when I had to QC dubs of the TV shows lost in the fire. I had no idea of the extent of what happened.
I have also had to digitize tapes of an old variety show that contains musical performances by legendary acts listed in this story that will never be seen again due to music licensing laws. I am one of only 2 people who have seen this music which aired only once 50 years ago.
21
@Liz What old variety show was it?
Incredible research and insight to the business. More corporate greed on the backs of artists, shocking. An incredible loss .Great work Randy.
12
What an amazing well written in depth article - and how your passion for music shines through every line ! And what a terrible tragedy - one weeps for the lost work of so many thousands!!
7
A terrible loss but what an excellent article.
14
The music companies now make a ton of their money from licensing songs for TV and movies.
It has killed theme songs.
1
@WesTex
And when you hear the strains of a sweet, simple song with innocent lyrics set to a contemporary movie scene that you wish to fast forward beyond, you wonder if the licensee is purposely sardonic or is merely ignorant of the music's origin and meaning. Some of the pop tunes I'd love never to hear again, others evoke strong personal and cultural memories, from the days when every couple had "our song"... Is that even a thing, anymore?
This is the the most heartbreaking,non-war, non-human death article that I have ever read. That music was our soul .
54
I wonder if the fine art industry had developed any protocol to decentralize the warehousing of precious inventory that UMG might have taken advantage of?
6
What a way to start the morning. This literally brought tears to my eyes. This loss is staggering and incalculable. I hope every living artist or their representative pays heed to the results of this neglect. I also think about how Frank Zappa was able to wrest his masters back from MGM only to find the tapes had been allowed to degrade from improper storage. Listening to RYKO reissues of those early recordings, Zappa was forced to re-record passages that had fallen into dust, and anyone who imprinted on the vinyl can hear note-for-note the difference. Perhaps as insurance against this happening again, thankfully he created his own Vault, and a team lead by Alex Winter of 'Bill and Ted' fame spearheaded a successful Kickstarter campaign to digitize the Vault. To what extent that 'off-site' backup was inspired by the UMG loss we don't know, but we should be thankful that someone had the foresight to do so. I can't imagine that the work was comprehensive, but reading something like this makes one hope and wish it was. The Library of Congress should take all the surviving UMG materials by eminent domain as punishment and preservation. And I hope someone rethinks protocol on roof repairs for this sort of thing. Imagine if they had just added a bit of cool water and a touch of the hand or a temperature probe, rather than rely simply on time, and un-aided visual inspection. Fools.
165
@MJB Chances are, it wasn't improper storage that degraded Zappa's recordings, but the use of backcoated recording tape. All backcoated tape, used in the 1970's to early 1990's or so absorbed moisture which loosened the binder. These tapes shed. They usually can be played one last time by "baking" (actually dehydrating) the tape. This happened to all the tape manufacturers (Scotch, Ampex, BASF and others) and was a problem across the industry. Of course, if the tapes had been stored in very dry conditions, they probably survived better, but no one could have anticipated this problem before it happened.
5
@Martin Brooks I was referring to his masters for the four LPs from his time with MGM/Verve which was 1966–68; before the time you cite.
5
A big corporation deceives the public about its negligence and the truth of a tragic incident that took place under its watch?
No one should be shocked by the sad facts revealed in this story.
Nor should anyone be shocked if, now that the truth is out, dozens of artists and their heirs now sue Universal Music (and rightly so) for its neglectful preservation and storage practices, which deprived the world of an extraordinary aural legacy.
136
@GF - Is preservation included in a contract, or simply an afterthought similar to the handling of most familiy history?
Jody, nice job on this piece. This was extremely well written! Clearly, you have a passion for this very important area of the music industry. Sadly, companies have not been as careful stewards of this material as they should be. Thank you for putting this piece together!
8
Fantastic article. I've dealt with these archives. The problem has gotten worse. Most smaller labels today have no storage at all. No archiving process at all. Thanks again.
13
Extremely well written, in depth article that exposes a cultural tragedy as well as the depth of the gulf that separates the artist’s product and those who exploit it.
9
This loss occurred in 2008, and the article does an excellent job of delineating the extent of executives' failure to recognize the inherent value of these assets. Yet years earlier Ted Turner gave a vivid demonstration of the value of old entertainment assets and TCM is still generating profits from them. This is really a two-step problem: the failure to recognize their value, as well as a misplaced trust in new technology (digitization). In all fairness, it probably would have required a soothsayer to fully comprehend the impact of technology advances. The intersection of art, technology and business is always going to be tricky, but the proclivity of business to get an overweighted say is likely to be a problem forever.
27
What an incredibly well-written article, and how sad. It points so originally, and yet so familiarly, to our corporate foibles, resulting in the loss of human dignity and actual worth. Not to comment is to perpetuate a terrible habit; thank you, NYTimes, for the insight and atonement. Musicians, unite, protest, and let’s strike a win-win deal where we unburden these corporations of their aging loads, and preserve them properly for our next generations.
31
I wept as the full horror dawned while I read thru the tears. I have been so struck by the difference in fidelity of the first-press jazz and blues albums I've been lucky enough to procure. Old-school analog. I drop the needle and the fullness of sound crushes me. So close to the master, I'm thinking, like I'm in the studio with them! I feel like an archeologist experiencing discovery. I imagine. I'm transported. Now the precious originals are lost. The enormity overwhelms. I am bereft. Carpe diem.
36
@Gowan McAvity I refer you to a triple album by George Harrison: All Things Must Pass.
3
@bill
No, it's not always going to be this grey
All things must pass away, all things must pass away
1
@Gowan McAvity So much for bereft!
Thanks for a great article. Your passion for the music is evident throughout.
17
I know it's become a hackneyed phrase, but I sometimes think that some of the captains of the entertainment industry truly only 'know the price of everything and the value of nothing.' These are lost national treasures.
This warehouse was made of corrugated metal. The sprinkler systems were inadequate, and the water pressure was low.
Years before, many negatives and prints of early Hollywood films on volatile nitrate stock either went up in flames or just turned to dust. Those films now exist in name only. You'd think they'd have learned from that.
184
@T Norris - I read that Janis Joplin died at the age of 27... yes, 27 from a heroin overdose. Think of all the great music that we have never heard... will never hear. She was not the first, and won't be the last.
Yes, indeed... "You'd think they'd have learned from that."
An irreplaceable treasure lost; done in by short sited thinking and bean counting. Hooray for Hollywood.
I am not fond of government involvement in general; but perhaps a small grant for the preservation of cultural treasures like these might be a good idea. Preservation and cataloging cost money. Most businesses are too focused on immediate profit to undertake noble costly projects.
The irony here is that those tapes could have been a source of revenue for those companies. I would pay to download a super high quality digital copy of some of my favorites.
28
Not mentioned here is what typically happens when music is "remastered" these days, even if it is done from the original tapes. When you buy a remastered work, it has almost always been subjected to loudness enhancements that drastically alter the original sound - quiet parts are boosted and the dynamic range reduced. This is why there's a market for early edition CDs and vinyl of classic recordings.
125
I agree that "remastered" results are often far from the original sound.
Often, The first pressings had a kind of audible atmosphere to them that is not captured on remastered or on digitized recordings. However, I have heard some that are incredibly good. Why the disparity? Why with all our incredible technology can't we reproduce extremely close to the original? What could it be other than sound engineers who are inept?
2
Paul Simon indicated back a couple decades ago at least that they could not find the original Simon & Garfunkel masters when Sony/Columbia producing a collection of CDs. They ended up seeking out and using very pristine copies of the original Simon & Garfunkel LPs.
48
One of the master copies originally sent to Europe were retrieved a few years ago to produce an excellent sounding LP box set.
2
@Michael FREMER In the early seventies I was
a recording engineer or RCA records in Hollywood. The drill in those days at RCA was
to send a copy to those folks abroad that was
made at the time the master disc was cut containing all the adjustments (eq. compression
etc,) that were made in making the master disc that was used for US release. I don't know
for a fact that Simon and Garfunkel's label operated in the same way but I would guess they did.If so. the tape sent to Europe would
have been second generation.So that tape
could not properly be called a "master".
2
Let's think back the Library of Alexandria which housed the great works of literature and science from the Mediterranean cultures, many lost forever, some rumored to have existed. That is how bad the loss of these masters is.
Few remember the D'Medicis (politicians and bankers) but who does not Michelangelo's David or Da Vinci's Mona Lisa?
Compared with profit, only art and literature is important.
70
@Svirchev - I wonder if the rest of the world has had better luck with preservation?
The Cathedral of Notre-Dame can be rebuilt. The recordings lost in the Universal fire are lost forever.
This was the real tragedy.
56
I remember the fire at the Universal backlot. Having always wanted to visit it, I was sad that I'd never get the chance to walk streets I knew well from the movies. Now that disaster is, I realize, compounded by the criminal carelessness with which the archives were handled. Imagine losing Judy Garland's old master tapes as well as the others.
Corporations do not seem to understand that they are also stewards of what's come before. It's not the first time I've heard of films and music being lost.
A slice of the past: My 100-year-old friend used to work for MGM here in New York City before it relocated all its offices to California. When she was finished with her own work, she'd don white gloves and help the other girls inspect reels, slated to be delivered to movie theaters, for damage, and then take a scissors and tape and make repairs.
I did that myself, once, with old family movies from the 1940s. And another time, when I broke in half my mother's old 78 of Deanna Durbin singing "Loch Loman," I was actually able to glue it back together (with the other side, alas, unplayable). The urge to preserve is strong.
I guess not for people whose every thought boils down to money.
As an aside, Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal, was a strong believer in preservation. In his case, he spent a good number of years, a lot of lucre, and the patience of reluctant State Department representatives, in trying to get Jews out of Germany before the war made that impossible.
38
Heartbreaking! All I can think of is art historians of the future piecing together what was, but is now no longer, tracing our musical history as we do the ancients.
16
Fascinating story, but I'm surprised that no mention is made of the natural degradation of magnetic tapes over time.
All magnetic tapes I've ever worked with in my life tend to fade over time - old VHS movies, cassette tapes, floppy discs - how would an old magnetic tape from the 1940s fare any better? Would an old "master" really be as good as when it was recorded?
Maybe the music companies really need to dig out all their precious masters and digitize them at the maximum possible resolution that modern technology allows, before the passing of time achieves the same result as the LA fire did.
87
@Andy--from the article: "...digital recordings are perishable in their own right — far less stable, in fact, than recordings on magnetic tape."
23
@Andy
Yes! It's a fascinating story, but I too was wondering for how many years the master tapes retained better sound quality than the copies.
5
A gross generalization! Scotch 111 used for Blue Note and much else in the 1950s sounds as new.
16