#master tapes

The destroyed Chess masters encompassed nearly everything else recorded for the label and its subsidiaries, including most of the Chess output of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Bo Diddley, Etta James, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy and Little Walter. Also very likely lost were master tapes of the first commercially released material by Aretha Franklin, recorded when she was a young teenager

Virtually all of Buddy Holly’s masters were lost in the fire. Most of John Coltrane’s Impulse masters were lost, as were masters for treasured Impulse releases by Ellington, Count Basie, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and other jazz greats. Also apparently destroyed were the masters for dozens of canonical hit singles, including Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats’ “Rocket 88,” Bo Diddley’s “Bo Diddley/I’m A Man,” Etta James’s “At Last,” the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” and the Impressions’ “People Get Ready.”

The list of destroyed single and album masters takes in titles by dozens of legendary artists, a genre-spanning who’s who of 20th- and 21st-century popular music. It includes recordings by Benny Goodman, Cab Calloway, the Andrews Sisters, the Ink Spots, the Mills Brothers, Lionel Hampton, Ray Charles, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Clara Ward, Sammy Davis Jr., Les Paul, Fats Domino, Big Mama Thornton, Burl Ives, the Weavers, Kitty Wells, Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Bobby (Blue) Bland, B.B. King, Ike Turner, the Four Tops, Quincy Jones, Burt Bacharach, Joan Baez, Neil Diamond, Sonny and Cher, the Mamas and the Papas, Joni Mitchell, Captain Beefheart, Cat Stevens, the Carpenters, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Al Green, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Elton John, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Buffett, the Eagles, Don Henley, Aerosmith, Steely Dan, Iggy Pop, Rufus and Chaka Khan, Barry White, Patti LaBelle, Yoko Ono, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, the Police, Sting, George Strait, Steve Earle, R.E.M., Janet Jackson, Eric B. and Rakim, New Edition, Bobby Brown, Guns N’ Roses, Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige, Sonic Youth, No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, Snoop Dogg, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Hole, Beck, Sheryl Crow, Tupac Shakur, Eminem, 50 Cent and the Roots.

It's a long and slightly terrifying article but the one reassuring part at the end is this:

Today several of the company’s nearly 1,500 facilities are devoted to entertainment assets. Warner Music Group stores hundreds of thousands of master recordings in Iron Mountain’s Southern California facilities, and nearly all of Sony Music Entertainment’s United States masters holdings — more than a million recordings — are reportedly kept in Iron Mountain warehouses in Rosendale, N.Y. The Boyers, Pa., facility where UMG keeps most of its United States masters is a 1.7-million-square-foot former limestone mine. The facility offers optimal archive conditions, climate control and armed guards. [x]

Universal Music Group on master tapes fire: 'We owe artists transparency'

Company to investigate 2008 storage unit fire in which up to 500,000 master recordings by Aretha Franklin, Elton John and others may have burned.

Universal Music Group CEO and chairman Sir Lucian Grainge has said that the company owes its artists “transparency” over the loss of up to 500,000 master recordings of songs in a 2008 fire.

The New York Times has revealed that original recordings by artists including Chuck Berry, Elton John, Aretha Franklin, Snoop Dog, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf were likely to have sustained irreparable damage in the fire, which took place at NBCUniversal Studios Hollywood.

At the time, reports claimed the incident primarily affected film and television materials, while Universal Studios officials claimed that “in no case was the destroyed material the only copy of a work”, and a representative for UMG claimed there was “no loss”.

However, the New York Times obtained depositions and internal Universal Music Group (UMG) files detailing significant losses that included masters from Decca and Chess catalogues, jazz greats including Alice Coltrane and Charles Mingus, and classic hit singles including Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and His Comets and Etta James’s At Last.

A high-profile Los Angeles law firm is representing “more than 10 but fewer than 100” musical acts, which it has declined to identify, who plan to take legal action over the losses. Howard King, partner in King, Holmes, Paterno & Soriano, told the LA Times: “This has a potentially huge impact on their future, coupled with the rather disturbing fact that no one ever told them that their intellectual property may have been destroyed.”

Court documents reveal that in 2009 UMG sued NBCUniversal and its parent company, Vivendi Universal, in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging negligent maintenance of the storage unit. It sought compensation and damages, and settled in 2013. King told the LA Times: “That would be a good fact to find: how much Universal Music got and then forgot to report to their artists, and to share with their artists.”

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