500,000 irreplaceable master recordings destroyed

[BigRedX]

21 hours ago, NancyJohnson said:

If an artist signs to a label, surely(!) they get an advance and if they're lucky they may make money off the back of record sales.  In the broadest sense, the label will put you up in a studio at their expense and whatever you record effectively becomes the label's property, master tapes and all.  Intellectual property is by definition intangible; tapes are tangible, the content thereon isn't. 

Very much this.

If the tapes stored were still the property of Universal Music, as they would have been in vast majority of their artist's contracts, they can do what they want with them. While not adequately protecting what has now become a valuable business asset is pretty stupid, I don't see what comeback any of the artists have since the items lost in the fire are not their property.

And any artist that does own their master tapes and allowed Universal Music to store them without making adequate back-ups only has themselves to blame.

[NancyJohnson]

Reports now of $100m lawsuit being filed against Universal.  Hey, on the upside at least nobody died, but on the downside the estates of a lot of dead musicians are now suing.

 

 

[paul_c2]

Will be interesting to see where this goes. I wonder if they continued charging money for safe storage, even after the fire and disappearance?

 

[BigRedX]

2 minutes ago, paul_c2 said:

Will be interesting to see where this goes. I wonder if they continued charging money for safe storage, even after the fire and disappearance?

Charging who?

AFAICS most of the tapes stored and audio recorded onto them were the property of Universal Music and unless their contracts with the individual artists state otherwise, UM can do what they want with them.

There might be a case for UM share holders to sue the company on the grounds of failing to adequately  protect company assets, but IMO that's as far as it goes.

[nilebodgers]

Can UMG prove that they own the rights to any of that music if they can't produce the masters?

[BigRedX]

8 minutes ago, nilebodgers said:

Can UMG prove that they own the rights to any of that music if they can't produce the masters?

Of course. It will be in the contracts. 

[Twigman]

On 23/06/2019 at 20:47, SpondonBassed said:

 

It makes you wonder how often this sort of thing occurs. 

Often - many years ago Midnight Music suffered a fire. A similar fate was dealt to most of the Sad Lovers & Giants multitrack recordings - the mixed down masters survived though.

[BigRedX]

Also a lot of the time even if the session was recorded on multitrack tape, these tapes would be eventually re-used if the record company or artist didn't buy them. Back in the days of multi-track tape recording a reel of 2" tape was a lot of money, and often could be a significant proportion of the overall recording cost.

Certainly I've never paid to keep any of the multi-track tapes of anything I've recorded in a commercial studio. The usual deal was that the tapes would be kept for a month or so just in case we wanted to go back, book some more studio time, and make changes to the mix, but after that they would be erased and re-used for another session.

In my situation it was always the case that by the time we had finished mixing the last track, we had run out of money, and besides AFAIWC the stereo mix was the important tape, not the multitrack.

The only multi-track sessions I actually own are the ones I recorded in my home studio, and these days none of them are accessible to me as the I no longer have the tape machines for those on tape, and the digital ones are the wrong format to load into the current version of my DAW.

[SpondonBassed]

9 hours ago, NancyJohnson said:

the estates of a lot of dead musicians are now suing

That's the thing.  Where does it stop after the artist has passed on?  Some of these estates are corporate entities more than representatives of the descendants of the deceased.

[SpondonBassed]

8 hours ago, Twigman said:

Often - many years ago Midnight Music suffered a fire. A similar fate was dealt to most of the Sad Lovers & Giants multitrack recordings - the mixed down masters survived though.

Was that a "convenient" fire?

The way the music industry works, I am prepared to believe that a lot of claims are made against fire insurance in cases of impending financial embarrassment.

I am glad you've still got the masters.  Were they the ones used on your band's CD box set?  @Andyjr1515 and I enjoyed listening to those in his car on the way to last year's bass bash.

[Twigman]

14 hours ago, SpondonBassed said:

Was that a "convenient" fire?

The way the music industry works, I am prepared to believe that a lot of claims are made against fire insurance in cases of impending financial embarrassment.

I am glad you've still got the masters.  Were they the ones used on your band's CD box set?  @Andyjr1515 and I enjoyed listening to those in his car on the way to last year's bass bash.

As I remember it it was a fire in a property of which Midnight rented some storage space.

It wasn't particularly 'convenient' for us.

Cherry Red have the masters now and yes, I believe most of the box set was made from those masters.

Glad you enjoyed the album - we do have a new one out since.

https://sadloversandgiants.co.uk/product/mission-creep-cd/

[mybass]

....another latest today....

New York Times publishes list of over 800 artists potentially affected by Universal archive fire
As Universal Music continues in its attempts to cast doubt on recent reporting in the New York Times about the 2008 fire that damaged its Hollywood-based archive, the newspaper has published a list of more than 800 artists who allegedly lost recordings in the blaze. Based on internal UMG documents produced in the wake of the fire, the Times says that, of the "many tens of thousands of tapes" covered by the list, "nearly all [are] original masters".

The newspaper adds that this list is not even complete, rather it's an amalgamation of a number of lists put together by Universal in 2009 and 2010 as part of 'Project Phoenix', the music firm's attempt to work out what had been lost and then try to source alternative copies, where possible. By the label's own estimates, it reiterates, over 100,000 tapes were lost, containing up to 500,000 individual tracks.

That the fire happened on a Universal Studios backlot in 2008 is no secret, of course. It was also known at the time that the Universal music company still stored archive recordings at the Hollywood site, even though it was no longer in common ownership with the Universal film business. But the NYT's recent articles allege that the music major greatly played down the severity of the damage caused at the time, and has continued to cover it up to this day. 

Although current Universal Music CEO Lucian Grainge recently admitted to his staff that "we owe our artists transparency" on the status of their archive material, he and the company's archiving exec Pat Krauss have both said that the original New York Times article on the fire is not accurate. For a Billboard article, Krauss even pulled out a John Coltrane master tape said to have been destroyed in order to prove his point. 

In its new article, the New York Times says that it is likely that some of the tapes listed as potentially lost are indeed safe. It estimates that the aforementioned Project Phoenix was able to source around a fifth of the affected recordings - either original copies that had been out of the archive at the time or back up copies of reasonable quality stored elsewhere. But that still means a lot of masters were completely lost. 

Following the publication of the first NYT article, several artists whose recordings appear on the lists commented on how they'd attempted to get hold of their masters at some point in the last decade, only to be told by Universal that they were lost. However, that they were destroyed in the fire was rarely explained. Speaking to the newspaper for its latest article on the fire, Bryan Adams recalls how in 2013 he wanted to put together a 30th anniversary release of his 1984 album 'Reckless'. 

"I contacted the archive dept of Universal Music", he says. "I called everyone, former A&M employees, directors, producers, photographers, production houses, editors, even assistants of producers at the time. I can tell you with 100% certainty that I couldn't find anything at Universal that had been published to do with my association with A&M records in the 1980s. If you were doing an archaeological dig there, you would have concluded that it was almost as if none of it had ever happened".

In the end, he discovered a tape in his own vault and was able to produce a remastered release. However, he says that throughout his conversations with UMG staff "there was no mention that there had been a fire in the archive". This despite his name appearing on the label's own list of artists whose work was thought to have been lost.

Last week, a group of artists named in the original article, including Soundgarden, Hole, Steve Earle, and the estates of Tom Petty and Tupac Shakur, filed a class action lawsuit against Universal in relation to the fire. As well as claiming that the label breached its contractual duty by failing to keep their master tapes safe, they are also seeking a portion of monies Universal seemingly received from an insurance claim in relation to the fire and a negligence lawsuit it brought against NBC Universal. 

While publicly playing down the extent of the fire damage in 2008, the artists' lawsuit claims, the label received large pay outs based on its own internal estimations of the damage. It then failed to share this with affected artists, or even to inform them that they had been affected. The lawsuit is demanding $100 million in damages.

It's thought that other lawsuits specifically relating to the 2008 fire could as yet follow. Meanwhile, other ongoing litigation could also force the music company to reveal more about the extent of the damage that occurred. A number of heritage artists in the US have already gone to court to test the reach of the so called 'termination' or 'reversion' right that exists under American copyright law, and whether this applies to master recordings.

The termination right says that 'authors' who assign their copyrights to another entity have a one-time opportunity to terminate that assignment and reclaim their rights after 35 years. This particular termination right comes from a piece of 1970s copyright law in the US, so only really kicked in earlier this decade.

On the songs side of the business songwriters reclaiming their US rights in this way has become routine. On the recordings side, however, many corporate rights owners have resisted efforts by artists to reclaim assigned rights. 

This is based on an argument over the nature of record contracts and the status of the artist in copyright terms. Many labels insist that record deals are so called 'work for hire' agreements that basically make artists employees, so that the default owner of any copyrights they create is their employer, ie the label.

Lawsuits were filed against both Universal and Sony earlier this year attempting to gain court confirmation that artists are in fact able to regain their recording rights by employing the termination right. If they are, that would include the return of their master recordings. In those circumstances, the label would have to admit what tapes it does or doesn't have.

The potential outcome of the reversion rights cases is just one black cloud hanging over Universal parent company Vivendi's plan to sell up to 50% of its shares in the music company. The fallout from the NYT's articles on the big fire is another. Although last week, Vivendi CEO Arnaud De Puyfontaine told Variety that the new scandal surrounding the 2008 blaze was "just noise" and would have no effect on the share sale plan. However, it seems unlikely that "noise" is going to subside anytime soon. 

Responding to De Puyfontaine's comments, Howard King, the lawyer leading the first lawsuit to be launched off the back of the New York Times' report, told Variety: "The likelihood that their life's works may have been destroyed by the gross negligence of Universal Music is far from 'just noise' to any potentially affected artist". 

He went on: "It wasn't 'just noise' in 2009 when Universal Music sued NBC Universal, claiming that hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable masters had been lost in the devastating fire. It wasn't 'just noise' when Universal Music collected tens of millions of dollars, or more, in compensation for the lost masters. I believe that Mr De Puyfontaine wishes this would all disappear and not interfere with his financial planning. This wish will not come true".

Universal has not yet commented on the fire-specific lawsuit. However, with the publication of the extended list of affected artists by the New York Times, it seems likely that many more artists will now be asking questions, and potentially going legal, in the coming weeks.

 

[Jazzmaster62]

Rick Beato live streaming right now about this. 

[Stub Mandrel]

On 24/06/2019 at 11:06, BigRedX said:

Stems?

Most recordings made before the mid-60s would have been live direct to mono so there wouldn't be any stems.

I have several problems with the supposed loss of masters and multi-track tapes.

1. No matter how good an analogue tape recording is, it will never be as good as a high resolution digital recording. Analogue tape simply doesn't have the dynamic range or signal to noise ratio of a good digital recording. Any digital masters should have identical safety copies stored elsewhere.

2. There's a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth at the loss of unreleased recordings by various artists. IME, from hearing re-issue albums with "bonus" tracks on them, these recordings were unreleased at the time because they simply weren't as good as the music that was released, and maybe it is best that they stay that way.

3. I'm very much a believer in keeping the recordings the way they were from when they were originally released. By all means re-master them for any new delivery formats, as the whole point of mastering is to optimise the recording for the strengths and weaknesses of each individual delivery format - be it vinyl, cassette tape, CD, various compressed digital formats. Each should have its own mastered recording which should only be used for that particular format. However it is also my experience that for small volume vinyl releases the "mastered" version is produced at the cutting stage, which reduces the number of tape generations a recording goes through in order to preserve the dynamic range and signal to noise ratio.

3. None of the music that has been released has actually been lost. Some restoration work might be necessary for those recordings that now only exist on vinyl pressings, but the music is still there to be heard and salvaged. A good restoration engineer can work wonders with less than optimum source material to the point where it should be impossible to tell that any restoration work has been carried out.

Respectfully, I think you've missed the point.

1. No amount of digital conversion will ever completely replicate an original analogue master, whatever it's shortcomings. You can't get better than the original data, and in the future new techniques might let us get more out of it (like when they found it was possible to extract colour data from some old B&W TV recordings - you would not have been able to do that with B&W digital copies).

2. The quality of such unreleased recordings varies. Some are very good or at least tell us a lot about the songwriting/recording process and the artist's musical journey. In any case most of these tracks will be better than the likes of me will ever produce!

3. An original master is an important document. Anyone (even me!) who has played with their own recordings, however humble, will know you can get very different results from the same original material - only last week I listened to some recordings of mine and realised I could have done a much better job with some simple changes. I have the original 4-track cassettes and may have a another go! And imagine what could be achieved by going back to 1930s recordings of the old blues giants?

4. Of course released music has been lost, but out of 500,000 tracks I very much doubt all the unreleased material was crap.

[Hobbayne]

All The Beatles multitracks and masters were digitally copied in the 1990's for safekeeping, and the original 1960's tapes are stored in a secure vault at Abbey Road.

The recent White Album and Sgt Pepper 50th Anniversary editions were taken from the original analogue tapes not the digital copies.

 

[BigRedX]

On 26/06/2019 at 21:08, Stub Mandrel said:

Respectfully, I think you've missed the point.

1. No amount of digital conversion will ever completely replicate an original analogue master, whatever it's shortcomings. You can't get better than the original data, and in the future new techniques might let us get more out of it (like when they found it was possible to extract colour data from some old B&W TV recordings - you would not have been able to do that with B&W digital copies).

2. The quality of such unreleased recordings varies. Some are very good or at least tell us a lot about the songwriting/recording process and the artist's musical journey. In any case most of these tracks will be better than the likes of me will ever produce!

3. An original master is an important document. Anyone (even me!) who has played with their own recordings, however humble, will know you can get very different results from the same original material - only last week I listened to some recordings of mine and realised I could have done a much better job with some simple changes. I have the original 4-track cassettes and may have a another go! And imagine what could be achieved by going back to 1930s recordings of the old blues giants?

4. Of course released music has been lost, but out of 500,000 tracks I very much doubt all the unreleased material was crap.

And respectfully you are wrong.

1. Analogue recording for the most part is terrible. You are constantly fighting distortion against signal to noise ratio, and the dynamic range is poor compared to even 16bit digital. Every extra track you use at the multi-track stage and every time you do a mix down or bounce you are adding more tape noise to the signal. Add in the fact that many bands of tape for both multi-track and mixed masters is now starting to deteriorate badly - if you are lucky anything recorded on Ampex tape might make it through the single pass required to make a digital copy. A good digital transfer will be as good as the original analogue master allows it to be.

2. No, you can't know how good unreleased tracks are going to be without hearing them. But... listening to what does get released, IMO most bands struggle to write and record 50 minutes of quality music for each album. The best songs get released as singles, then the rest of the album is filled with the next best songs and what is left over is used for the B-sides of the singles. Therefore if there is anything left over, it will be less good than the least interesting B-side or album track. The same with alternative takes of the tracks that do make it onto the releases. The best version gets released to others don't. Certainly as a punter I have yet to hear a previously unreleased track or alternative take that I thought was better than the ones the band and/or record company chose to release at the time.

3. An original master is an important document, but I'm not keen on artists who go back and fiddle with the past to try and improve upon it. By all means have another go at recording the songs if you think you can do something better with them, but leave the original recordings alone. As a songwriter I have more fun revisiting old ideas with new bands/musicians and seeing what new elements they can bring to them, than going back and tarting up old recordings.

A recording is a document of it's time, the technical limitations of the recording process are part of the sound, and you made the recording you had to based on the techniques and facilities available at the time. Don't for a moment think that if musicians who made their recordings direct live, direct to mono because that is all that was available would have made the same records if they had access to a modern multitrack studio.

4. Maybe not, but most of the music lost has sat un-listened to in a vault for 20+ years. If the record label though they were worth releasing, I'm sure they would have done so by now, after back catalogue is where the money is the days. As for the artists involved, none of them were making a very vocal fuss about the recordings until it looked as though they had been destroyed in the fire. That to me says they had all moved on the new things musically.

And the most important fact of all is that AFAIK the vast majority of the recordings lost were the property of Universal Music, and while losing the originals of your back catalogue is poor business, that's all it is.

[Stub Mandrel]

4 hours ago, BigRedX said:

1. Analogue recording for the most part is terrible. You are constantly fighting distortion against signal to noise ratio, and the dynamic range is poor compared to even 16bit digital. Every extra track you use at the multi-track stage and every time you do a mix down or bounce you are adding more tape noise to the signal. Add in the fact that many bands of tape for both multi-track and mixed masters is now starting to deteriorate badly - if you are lucky anything recorded on Ampex tape might make it through the single pass required to make a digital copy. A good digital transfer will be as good as the original analogue master allows it to be. 

With all the shortcomings of analogue tapes, please explain how a digital copy made from one can be better?

I've got no problem with making new ADD masters from original tapes but why go to ADDD if you don't have to?

4 hours ago, BigRedX said:

2. Certainly as a punter I have yet to hear a previously unreleased track or alternative take that I thought was better than the ones the band and/or record company chose to release at the time.

This will always be subjective, but as an example I recently got Jethro Tull's Broadsword and the Beast without realising it had bonus tracks. IMHO at least couple of these are better than tracks on the album, and I didn't feel any of them were 'makeweight', just that perhaps they thought they didn't fit as well with the album's concept.  Ironically I think Down at the End of Your Road is an archetypal Tull song that would have made an excellent bookend to Beastie on the 'beast' side of the album.,

There was also the original of Jack Frost and the Hooded Crow, an Ian Anderson song I already knew and loved, because Dave Pegg put a solo version on The Cocktail Cowboy Goes it Alone. It's great to hear it as originally intended.

OK I'm a bit of a Tull fan, but isn't that saga enough to show how there is certainly an audience for this sort of material among most band's followers?

There's also Coda, the Zeppelin album salvaged from 'unused tracks', which I really like.

4 hours ago, BigRedX said:

3. An original master is an important document, but I'm not keen on artists who go back and fiddle with the past to try and improve upon it. By all means have another go at recording the songs if you think you can do something better with them, but leave the original recordings alone. As a songwriter I have more fun revisiting old ideas with new bands/musicians and seeing what new elements they can bring to them, than going back and tarting up old recordings.

It's not exactly clear, but I think most of the tapes lost were the original multitracks rather than masters (most of the press don't understand the difference). I think Jimmy Page's remastering of some Led Zeppelin classics was perhaps a more valid way to use old material than the 'release everything' approach shown by some bands. Creating a new mix doesn't invalidate the old one or damage it in any way and there are some albums (Born Again, by Black Sabbath - mixed so bass heavy by Geezer Butler you can hardly hear anything else) that could be drastically improved by re mixing/mastering.

I do draw the line at the re-recording of parts as notoriously happened with one Ozzy Album (Bark at the Moon?) when Shazza (according to Oz) fell out with the old musicians over a royalty dispute.

4 hours ago, BigRedX said:

4. Maybe not, but most of the music lost has sat un-listened to in a vault for 20+ years. If the record label though they were worth releasing, I'm sure they would have done so by now, after back catalogue is where the money is the days. As for the artists involved, none of them were making a very vocal fuss about the recordings until it looked as though they had been destroyed in the fire. That to me says they had all moved on the new things musically.

And the most important fact of all is that AFAIK the vast majority of the recordings lost were the property of Universal Music, and while losing the originals of your back catalogue is poor business, that's all it is.

After 35 years US artists have the right to ask for their original tapes back.

Songs that never saw the light might be for all sorts of reasons, including 'not commercial enough' or 'they might dent sales of versions by other artists' etc. etc.

If the artists get their songs back, they can make the decisions for themselves.

 

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to start a row here, and I do think you've made some valid points. But I find this a fascinating subject and I'm intrigued that your views are (generally) so different to mine; responding to those points has helped me clarify my own thoughts on the issue.

Would be far more civilised to discuss over a few pints!

 

[paul_c2]

4 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

With all the shortcomings of analogue tapes, please explain how a digital copy made from one can be better?

 

He didn't say it would be better, he actually used the words "will be as good". (You actually quoted him - did you forget to read it properly)?

But since you ask, its possible that a digital copy made many years ago, possibly at the time it was originally recorded, will be better if the analogue tape has subsequently degraded. Also, since lossless copies can be made, and stored in places such as data warehouses or disparate locations, there is a much greater chance it will exist where the analogue original has been lost. 

[Stub Mandrel]

2 hours ago, paul_c2 said:

He didn't say it would be better, he actually used the words "will be as good". (You actually quoted him - did you forget to read it properly)?

But since you ask, its possible that a digital copy made many years ago, possibly at the time it was originally recorded, will be better if the analogue tape has subsequently degraded. Also, since lossless copies can be made, and stored in places such as data warehouses or disparate locations, there is a much greater chance it will exist where the analogue original has been lost. 

Fair point. I just got over excited 🙂

Really old digital version may only be 16 bit, or (relatively) low sample rates compared to what is used today, especially if made before the 1990s. These are quite possibly going to be inferior and at the least limit the options for further processing.

Of course it's a moot point if we don't have the original analogue recording to compare the digital version to!

There was also my original point that in the future we may be able to recover more from analogue tapes than we can at present.

[paul_c2]

If 16 bit limits the further options for processing (I don't think it would though, unless you were very sloppy recording it initially) then that same limitation would apply to the analogue recording. Think about it......

 

[BigRedX]

22 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

Fair point. I just got over excited 🙂

Really old digital version may only be 16 bit, or (relatively) low sample rates compared to what is used today, especially if made before the 1990s. These are quite possibly going to be inferior and at the least limit the options for further processing.

Of course it's a moot point if we don't have the original analogue recording to compare the digital version to!

There was also my original point that in the future we may be able to recover more from analogue tapes than we can at present.

Analogue tape recording is always best viewed through the rose-tinted glasses of those who have never spent much time using it (or who only used it in top flight studio where there were always good engineers to shield them from the complexities). Straight off even a standard CD quality (16 bit, 44.1kHz) digital recording will have a larger dynamic range and better frequency response than the vast majority of analogue recordings.

How good your recording on analogue tape is, will be down to many factors but tape width and speed are two of the most important ones. But every improvement you make also has a trade off. Increasing the tape width per track increases the signal and noise ratio  and the dynamic range available, but at the same time you also need to increase the tape speed to compensate for high frequency loss due to azimuth wander as the tape passes over the playback head. So you would think that all you need to do is to have tape with wide tracks running at high speed. Unfortunately as you increase the tape speed, while high frequency response increases, low frequency response will decrease.

Everything is a compromise, and while you should get better results on a stereo master running at 15ips by going from 1/4" tape (with a 1/8" track width) to 1/2" tape (with a 1/4" track width), you have to remember that your audio is coming from a 24 track 2" tape where the track width is only 1/12", so the audio quality has been compromised before it ever reaches the tape for the final mix.

And all of these systems are outperformed by the humble CD.

[Stub Mandrel]

18 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

And all of these systems are outperformed by the humble CD.

But beat the crap out of MP3 and Digital Radio....

[BigRedX]

2 minutes ago, Stub Mandrel said:

But beat the crap out of MP3 and Digital Radio....

But MP3 and DAB are no longer serious delivery systems, now that the bandwidth is available for uncompressed 16bit 44.1KhZ audio.

They are the dictaphone tape of digital world.

[Stub Mandrel]

6 minutes ago, BigRedX said:

But MP3 and DAB are no longer serious delivery systems, now that the bandwidth is available for uncompressed 16bit 44.1KhZ audio.

They are the dictaphone tape of digital world.

Ha! Not when my broadband tops out at 2.2Mb/s...

[paul_c2]

But we're not storing the masters of iconic pop songs in MP3 on Stub Mandrel's home computer......(are we?)