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[Woody Nuss]

This'll make you cry...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html


The Day the Music Burned
It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business — and almost nobody knew. This is the story of the 2008 Universal fire.

[Steve Litcher]

Great article. Thanks for sharing.

[Dave Garoutte]

OMG 

[Chris Hindle]

This'll make you cry...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html


The Day the Music Burned
It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business — and almost nobody knew. This is the story of the 2008 Universal fire.

Ya, i saw that on the weekend news.
Such a loss to everyone, not just the music biz.
Chris.

[TrevorMilburn]

This'll make you cry...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html


The Day the Music Burned
It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business — and almost nobody knew. This is the story of the 2008 Universal fire.

Amazing how the full details were kept secret for so long and now it has hit the headlines absolutely everywhere. The litigation process has now officially started with one firm of lawyers announcing that they are representing  between 10 &100 (their figures) artists claiming potential loss of both intellectual property and potential future earnings. This could potentially be a hugely expensive  and long drawn out process.

[Adam Kane]

Man...that's depressing.

[Chris Hindle]

Man...that's depressing.

For me what's MORE depressing is how the Lawyers are going to get a mountain of cash, and the people that MADE the music get jack shit.
I'm pretty sure the Studio had ownership of the tapes. Not the artists.
What will the artists and estates sue for?
As silly as it seems, they are not the owners of the destroyed media.
Chris.

[Tim McCulloch]

For me what's MORE depressing is how the Lawyers are going to get a mountain of cash, and the people that MADE the music get jack shit.
I'm pretty sure the Studio had ownership of the tapes. Not the artists.
What will the artists and estates sue for?
As silly as it seems, they are not the owners of the destroyed media.
Chris.

If the artists were also the composers and authors of the music (and they have retained their rights) they may have a claim that they have lost the "best copy" of their work.  Performers who have retained performance rights may have a similar claim.  Artists may have claim that the label did not exercise due diligence in the storage of intellectual property and deprive them of future earnings from exploitation of the material.  Estates of deceased artists can also bring such claims.

In a magazine interview about 30 years ago Frank Zappa had some great advice for musicians and bands to avoid being ripped off if they got signed to a record label.  Part of that advice was to have all master recordings (including unreleased material) and master rights revert back to the artist within a year of the label removing the album, single, or artist from the label's catalog.  There's a good reason for this:  once a label "drops" (different meaning than today's use for releasing a song) a recording the sales from that recording are no longer applied to any advances on earnings the artist received and it becomes impossible for the recording to recoup.  The recording becomes a hostage.

The "standard contract" offer from a record label often gave the label pretty much all rights - songwriting was shared with composers/authors but publishing was in house, distribution was in house, and all advances for recording, promotion, and tour support were recoupable against record sales.  Labels kept all rights until the advances were recouped in full, including rights to unreleased material recorded or written as the result of such advances on earnings.  Even if the sales paid back all the advances and the artist and label parted ways, often the recording master rights remained with the label and even when not, it was almost impossible for the artist to get physical possession of the master recordings unless that was explicitly stated in the original contract.

While tort claims for loss of future earnings are not new, I'm thinking that on this scale we'll be seeing some new legal-eagle things decided.

[Tim McCulloch]

But wait, there's more.

"In court filings made public Thursday, Universal Music Group (UMG) disclosed specifics about some of the recordings lost or damaged in a 2008 vault fire. They include works by Nirvana, Elton John, Soundgarden and other artists.

UMG publicly admitted specific losses for the first time as part of an ongoing lawsuit launched by several artists and musicians' estates last year — including those of Tupac Shakur and Tom Petty — after the New York Times published an investigation into the fire last June. "  https://www.npr.org/2020/02/14/806132983/court-records-confirm-works-from-nirvana-elton-john-and-others-burned-in-2008-fi

Original NYTimes Magazine link: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html

[Brian Jojade]

In today's day and age, it's surprising that only single copies of this content exists.

Electronic media is SO easy to duplicate, there's no reason not to.  It's not like original paintings where a copy isn't the same as an original.

[Jonathan Johnson]

In today's day and age, it's surprising that only single copies of this content exists.

Electronic media is SO easy to duplicate, there's no reason not to.  It's not like original paintings where a copy isn't the same as an original.

If the media is in digital format, it is possible to create exact duplicates in geographically distant locations.

If the media is analog, every copy (no matter how faithful) is not exact and exhibits a degradation of quality. Even so, an archival copy in a separate location is better than completely losing the content. Copying analog media is far more time consuming than copying digital media, because to be faithful, the copy process tends to be 1:1.

You can speed up duplication of magnetic media, but to do so your components from the read head through to the write head must be capable of a higher frequency range. If digitizing at high speed, bitrates also increase. Regulation of media speed can also be more difficult at higher speeds. This all drives up the expense of high-speed duplication or digitizing equipment. Even at high speed, duplication of analog media is naturally more labor intensive.

Analog media also is more sensitive to environmental variation and takes up more space. A "backup library" would most likely take a digital form, simply to eliminate the cost of maintaining physical library space for a secondary copy of analog media.

Replicating a very large analog library -- whether to analog or digital -- can be an overwhelming task that can take many years. It can be a huge expense no matter what compromises you make to reduce cost. When going digital, you increase the risk of losing control of your intellectual property, either through modification of the content, through unauthorized copying and redistribution, or through obsolescence of protocols and codecs.

All offline media, regardless of analog or digital, risks mechanical obsolescence: the ability to find equipment to read the media. How many wire recorders are available? Where can you read a 5 1/4" floppy? How about that QIC tape cartridge? How many of you still have an 8-track player?

That's probably why there was only one copy: the cost of replication was just too high to bear.

[Tim McCulloch]

That's probably why there was only one copy: the cost of replication was just too high to bear.

The cost the owners of the master recordings did not want to bear.  The question of who actually *owns* the tape in the vault or warehouse is the key - while the composers and authors of the songs have rights, and the performers have rights, usually those do not pertain to the ownership of the recordings themselves.  In most cases the tapes were owned by the record label, in others by the artists that got rights to the masters after the label either dropped the recording from the catalog or recouped any advances paid to record the sessions.  It's possible that some artist/owners had no idea of how their masters and safety copies were being stored and might have moved them or arranged for backup copies if they'd known.

This fire could put a whole bunch of lawyer's kids through college...

[Brian Jojade]

If the media is analog, every copy (no matter how faithful) is not exact and exhibits a degradation of quality.

While true, with today's technology, a 2nd generation of a master is going to be so close to the original that you'd be hard pressed to identify which was the original and which was the copy.

[ProSoundWeb Community]