Hundreds of thousands of music masters destroyed

Post Reply New Topic

A New York Times Magazine article (I can't link) has revealed that a 2008 fire at NBC-Universal Studios in Hollywood, mostly covered at the time for having destroyed some standard movie sets and tkudust attractions also MASSIVELY destroyed the master recordings for many many thousands of audio recordings owned by Universal Music Group, one of the " Big Three " record companies! Most if not all of these masters were DESTROYED FOREVER . This included 20th and 21st Century recordings going back before tape, the likes of Bing Crosby, the Ink Spots. Louis Armstrong....and on through Patsy Cline, John Coltrane, Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, the Kingsmen and the Mamas and the Papas...on into modern times, with Nirvana and The Roots recordings gone! As well as thousands and thousands of lesser-known & obscure ones. of course. This includes many many hours of alternate takes and unreleased sessions, as well...and HMG has estimated as many a FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND, 5PO,00£, separate song recordings were destroyed !
Without the original masters to work from, future issues of the recordings can tend to be less in equity - They were not at all all on digital masters, and the article says, actually, a destroyed analog taoe master is more reconstructabld than a digital master .

Last edited by ASS-P on 13 Jun 2019, 11:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

That's very upsetting news. I wonder what young punk did that.

...The article says it was judged an accident - that a construction crew heat-fixing or something a roof in the sets area waited the according-to-the-rules hour or so after they turned the machinery off to make sure a fire didn't start and then went away but after they left the fixed roof sparked/caught fire anyway .

That was the same fire that destroyed part of the Back To The Future set and a King Kong display. The downtown square set claimed by the fire was also used in To Kill A Mockingbird. It also got a lot of early films that were being stored there temporarily (before they were going to be moved to more permanent storage in a salt mine). That fire caused a large loss to both the music and film world.

...The Times one didn't mention - No, maybe they did mention films being destroyed, but was it more celluloid copies of well-known films that exist otherwise but not in celluloid prints, or the only known prints of older films ' Silver Nitrite prints?

There was some very early original films that did get destroyed in that fire. I remember that when it was reported on tv, one of the reporters talked about how that area held some of the earliest films and that they were likely gone with the amount of heat given off by the fire. Sure, they were stored in fire-proof vaults, but not rated to that high of a temperature. The fire did not directly touch them, but they became cooked when the metal outside skin of the vault heated up and transferred the heat inside. The silver nitrate films produced back in the early days of the movie industry were not made to survive high heat. They were made to be shown a few years and then be thrown away. No one thought that we would still be trying to save them more than a hundred years after they were first made.

Silver nitrate films are problematic to correctly store long term. The compound reacts to moisture and gives off heat when it decomposes. Unfortunately if you have too many of them stored atone place and they decompose, the heat can be large enough to cause a fire in the vault. This happened numerous times in the early days of Hollywood, usually resulting in a loss of a set. Those type of films are now typically stored in a large underground salt mine in the middle of Kansas. They are not stored together in bulk, but placed far enough apart to prevent any buildup of heat if they do decompose. The conditions down there keep moisture out and a constant cool temperature, perfect to store valuable things. They do allow tours down there, with heavy security on hand to prevent theft.