The Day the Music Burned

xpost -- gotta be the latter.

https://variety.com/2019/music/news/vivendi-universal-music-group-fire-noise-arnaud-de-puyfontaine-1203248649/

https://variety.com/2019/music/news/universal-music-fire-zero-impact-on-company-value-1203249173/

https://variety.com/2019/film/reviews/childs-play-review-1203248744/

(Just seeing if you’re paying attention with that last one)

Chucky, firestarter.

seems like UMG is basically legally backed into a corner here where they have to deny deny deny now; even a well-meaning and more circumspect upper management can't realistically take steps to retroactively address this. In a saner world, this is where the government would step in and have library of congress or smithsonian start a taxpayer backed archiving process but i'm not holding my breath.

it appears that thread just got moved to Off Topic and not deleted on SHF for whatever weird reason.

Could somebody link that Hoffman thread? I don't know their site that well, particularly when it comes to them hiding/burying stuff.

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/the-day-the-music-burned-article.849828/

you have to be logged in to see the other forums.

In a saner world, this is where the government would step in and have library of congress or smithsonian start a taxpayer backed archiving process but i'm not holding my breath.

Ppl keep saying this, but I still don’t get what is being suggested... The gummint’ can’t force UMG to hand over their tapes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain_in_the_United_States

(yes, they can, and they should)

Good luck extending eminent domain to recordings; I’ll be watching the cases with interest.

it won't happen, but stop being so obtuse. of course the govt can seize private property.

I don’t think I’m the one being obtuse here, lol

My suggestion is that the government bails these guys out and BUYS the masters at an obscene premium (with 50-70% to be divvied among artists) but with limited reproduction rights. Effectively a national archive.

Cheap at a billion and better use than another stealth bomber but certainly not a priority for this administration.

xxp

fair enough, I just think there's plenty of existing precedent for this kinda thing as forks notes, but that assumes willing parties on all sides which is not exactly the case here from what I see

and on the legal side I guess this is more related to forfeiture, ianal

or yeah, what forks just said as well

And here we go.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/21/business/media/universal-music-fire-lawsuit.html

yay!

(?)

Oh it's a definite yay, believe me.

BREAKING: Class action complaint against Universal Music Group filed in U.S. District Court in L.A., in response to 2008 fire that destroyed master recordings. Plaintiffs: Tupac Shakur’s Trustee, Hole, Soundgarden, Steve Earle, Jane Petty (Tom Petty’s ex-wife). pic.twitter.com/5zrNSunFYs

— Jody Rosen (@jodyrosen) June 22, 2019

Interesting list of initial artists... makes me realize that those Hole and Soundgarden albums never have been reissued. (OTOH, the 2010 deluxe ed. of Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes was supposedly “Digitally remastered from the original analog master tapes”... of course that’s just one Petty album.)

There's deluxe Soundgarden reissues of Badmotorfinger and Superunknown.

... although maybe not from the original tapes.

Re:Tom Petty--I wonder if this is why they stopped his reissues with Long After Dark?

xp Really (re: Soundgarden)? I had checked on Amazon before posting (maybe not very well?)

Yup.

https://www.discogs.com/Soundgarden-Badmotorfinger/release/9434237

https://www.discogs.com/Soundgarden-Superunknown-Super-Deluxe/release/5790240

Both appearing in the last five years.

Yep, found it now on Amazon. $249.99 (Prime eligible!)

You think they may have an email trail of the band saying, “Why don’t we use the original masters?” and the label saying, “Uh, we’ll use a better-sounding tape...”

XP There are less-deluxe editons out there as well. A Superunknown double-disc was among the last domestic releases in that line.

FWIW, I have the single-disc Damn The Torpedoes from 2010, and it sounds great!

So are the plaintiffs suing for damages or do they want to void their still-existing contracts or are they demanding a return of the masters or all the above? Or is it not clear as of yet?

i mean, i see the damages listed but i'm curious if they can argue for breach of contract? do record contracts promise to maintain viability of masters in any way?

i am a bit naive about this element of the industry so please be gentle

Since they did 5.1 mixes of those two Soundgarden albums, you would think UMG had access to multitracks.

OTOH, nothing's happened w/Louder Than Love and Down On The Upside (and Cornell's Euphoria Morning), so...

Some of the lawsuit might be about loss of revenue streams. Take Hole for example: Deluxe Editions were never done for Live Through This & Celebrity Skin, even though there probably was a market for them, and most likely lots of out-takes, B-Sides, live stuff, demos etc. that could have been bundled into reissues. If those materials were destroyed, there's no incentive to do reissue of albums one can find pretty easily used or in a bargain bin.

Since they did 5.1 mixes of those two Soundgarden albums, you would think UMG had access to multitracks.

Yeah, I was thinking/wondering that same thing. (I searched around a little and didn’t find anything explicitly saying/claiming that the original masters were used...)

One more thing about Hole: The second disc of LTT already came out as a Europe-only release called My Body, The Hand Grenade in 1997. It's also the only official Hole comp ever released on physical media.

i mean, i see the damages listed but i'm curious if they can argue for breach of contract? do record contracts promise to maintain viability of masters in any way?

I’ve never seen a recording contract, but my guess (just a guess) is that they don’t say anything about how masters will be stored... or, at most, maybe some make a reference to something like “the customary standards of care in the recording industry.” (Total speculation here)

Anecdotally I've socially known two very successful indieish recording artists who owned their own master tapes of at least one album. They both kept them in piles of household miscellany, and one left hers behind when she moved out of a shared apartment and happily was able to reclaim it years later from the ex-roommate who was still there and hadn't bothered to toss it out.

Stories like that remind me of this: I Am The Proud Owner Of The Original Master Tape Of Color Me Badd's "We Can Do The Nasty"!!

We have an update, sadly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/25/magazine/universal-music-fire-bands-list-umg.html

Note that the loss of the Cadet/Cadet Concept masters by Terry Callier, Rotary Connection, Marlena Shaw and Phil Upchurch et al also meant the destruction of virtually all the major works of a hero of mine who’s not on the list: the genius producer/arranger Charles Stepney. https://t.co/qX6fNCBR3N

— Andy Zax (@andyzax) June 25, 2019

https://blog.discogs.com/en/the-discogs-top-50-best-selling-records-of-april-2019/

It’s bullshit. This is all bullshit, and you all know it. Look at it. Look at this. Reissues of reissues and barrel scrapings by faded artists of years past. It’s as if the great music of the world burnt up in some big fire {link to NYT article} and there just wasn’t enough to go around anymore. We let this happen. This is our fault. We let a tiny handful of individuals take away our collective musical heritage, bribe our government representatives to ensure we’ll never get it back, and they burnt it. We did this when we bought the same old trash over and over and over. You should be angry. Be angry right now. Do better, damn it. Stop supporting this trash and self-release and support independent artists and labels.

conflating a few different things there and being very hyperbolic, but ppl are mad about this!

This part of the story is so unnecessarily petty, it’s hilarious

The letter-grade rankings provide a snapshot of UMG’s marketplace wisdom circa 2010 — judgments that, at times, favor top-sellers with thin discographies over historically significant figures and critically-lionized innovators. Captain and Tennille, Chuck Mangione, Whitesnake, Sublime, White Zombie, Nelly Furtado and the Pussycat Dolls received A ratings. Les Paul, Merle Haggard, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Alice Coltrane, Captain Beefheart, the Neville Brothers and the Roots were given Bs.

How dare UMG think they might sell more copies of Sublime than Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

This paragraph address a point made above (re: Neil Young):

UMG’s own lists present riddles. Documents show that the company believed it had lost recordings by one of music’s most zealous audiophiles, Neil Young — whose website offers high-resolution versions of his complete discography, presumably sourced from the original masters. It is unclear if the Young recordings thought by UMG to have been destroyed were safety copies of the four albums he recorded for Geffen in the 1980s or outtakes from the sessions for those albums, or if UMG officials were simply mistaken about Young having had material in the backlot vault.

It really is stunning how much better off we’d be right now if Pono had taken off

scrolling through that list took an eternity.

we are truly in the worst timeline.