These two articles from the New York Times relating to the 2008 Universal Music Group fire nearly brought me to tears. What a tragedy!

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/maga ... dings.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/us/m ... -fire.html

Bloody sad
The dudes who fixed the roof obviously did not check the job properly. The Buddy Holly master tapes should have been in a museum

Boy this article made me sick.....it's a long read but what a HUGE loss...

Another good reason why people hate big corporations that only look out for the bottom line, instead of taking care of all the facets of their business.

It's amazing that this stuff wasn't backed up and kept off-site.

I'm going to bet that in the various consolidations, the first people to be a part of the outplacement synergies were those staff members, librarians, historians, who kept track of things, who understood the "spiritual" value of these materials and how much more important that was than the financial value.

So what have they been remastering all the reissues from?

I remember the incident and it was kept hush hush in its day so not to upset all those artists.

Universal's comments on the article:

https://variety.com/2019/music/news/uni ... 203239661/

While this is absolutely tragic, without moving towards an actual bank or seed vault scenario, I don't know what companies can do to guarantee the safety of celluloid masters (film or music) from this kind of accident. And that's a helluva lot to ask a company to do when governments can't afford to do it for everything. Because with celluloid being hydrocarbon based, anything resembling fire or dampness gets near a film vault, and it's gone.

My assumption on this would be that anything that any of the record companies thought they could exploit had been digitally captured and backed up to multiple locations. I don't dismiss the historical importance of the actual physical masters for name artists, or maybe more tragically, those of small artists who are now lost and had no other recording of their music. But there's been thousands of small artists, even today (well, pre iPhone anyway) whose recorded music at best might equate to a single track on a comp. So I mourn the lost physical masters, but give thanks that we didn't lose the music for most of the artists that people wanted to hear.

Oh, and computer technology being what it is, it wouldn't surprise me if they could reverse engineer the masters fairly easily from the recorded music, and even reintroduce recording limitations into the tracks. Not the same, I know, but close.

Yes, I think it was Billboard first reported. When I read the initial article the owner of the 'Rock Island' Collector's store did not want me to read this knowing how I upset I would get. And yeah, it did.

This was such a sad, sad read. And the archivist in charge at the time, who obviously feels horrible, can't get another gig and downsized to a trailer.

No kidding. Certainly not surprised by the response. How many "newly remastered from the master tapes" CDs have they sold in the last 11 years? Remastered from master tapes that apparently went up in flames in 2008?

I really wish I hadn't read those pieces. It made me ill.

Future releases will have a sticker that says "Mastered from pre-fire Master tapes...hopefully."