In June 2008, a massive fire ripped through Universal Studios in Hollywood.
We are just learning the extent the damage.
The fire was a big story at the time. However, it was characterized as only striking a King Kong attraction and a video vault.
The New York Times has just uncovered confidential files in which UMG admits that there was also a music archive in the video warehouse and up to 500,000 master recordings were destroyed.
"The scope this calamity is laid out in litigation and company documents, thousands pages depositions and internal UMG files that I obtained while researching this article. UMG’s accounting its losses, detailed in a March 2009 document marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” put the number “assets destroyed” at 118,230. Randy Aronson considers that estimate low: The real number, he surmises, was “in the 175,000 range.” If you extrapolate from either figure, tallying songs on album and singles masters, the number destroyed recordings stretches into the hundreds thousands. In another confidential report, issued later in 2009, UMG asserted that “an estimated 500K song titles” were lost.
Among the rappers who lost their masters were 2Pac, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, and 50 Cent.
Just a partial list the artists whom the fire affected reads like who's who popular music history:
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.
Without master recordings, new issues old music have to be released as a recording a recording or worse.
This is not an academic point. The recording industry is a business copies; ten as not, it’s a business copies copies copies. A Spotify listener who clicks on a favorite old song may hear a file in a compressed audio format called Ogg Vorbis. That file was probably created by converting an MP3, which may have been ripped years earlier from a CD, which itself may have been created from a suboptimal “safety copy” the LP master — or even from a dubbed duplicate that dubbed duplicate. Audiophiles complain that the digital era, with its rampant copy-paste ethos and jumble old and new formats, is an age debased sound: lossy audio files created from nth-generation transfers; cheap vinyl reissues, marketed to analog-fetishists but pressed up from sludgy non-analog sources. “It’s the audio equivalent the game ‘Telephone,’ ” says Henry Sapoznik, a celebrated producer historical compilation albums. “Who really would be satisfied with the sixth message in?”
The New York Times concludes it was "the biggest disaster in the history the music business."