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The Day the Music Burned

A terrible loss to civilisation how is it not more widely known about.
This is social history and it belongs to society as a whole.
If big corporations can't be trusted to take care of it it needs to be taken from them.
 
The fire 11 years ago destroyed Master Tapes. Perhaps half a million songs ! And hushed up for the last decade... I wonder why ?
 
This bit of article is very troubling
Today Universal Music Group is a Goliath, by far the world’s biggest record company, with soaring revenues bolstered by a boom in streaming music and a market share nearly double that of its closest competitor, Sony Music Entertainment. Last year, Vivendi announced a plan to sell up to 50 percent of UMG. The sale is the talk of the music business; rumored potential buyers include Apple, Amazon and the Chinese conglomerate Alibaba. The price tag is expected to be hefty
 
I thought the comment near the end was interesting too - that so many master tapes going into Iron Mountain are misfiled they're effectively lost.
 
The article suggests that a lot of the mastertapes had indeed been lost and careful proper digital copies had been made for only a fraction of them, particularly to preserve those that were in poor or deteriorating shape.

It really begs the question what all these "remastered from the original analog tapes" reissues are based on. They can only be using the digital copy or copies of the mastertapes several times removed. From my understanding, for hi-rez digital media, it is necessary to go back to the mastertapes to specifically master this stuff.
Apparently the definitions of "remastered" and "original" are very elastic in the biz: lots of people involved in reissuing this stuff neither know nor care what these terms mean. There are no set standards, no transparency, so...
 
I inquired Speakers Corner (who always use orig. analog masters when available) some years ago about their John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman release that suddenly wasn't to be found anywhere anymore and got a reply something about them no longer having the rights to the release - now I understand why.
 
I inquired Speakers Corner (who always use orig. analog masters when available) some years ago about their John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman release that suddenly wasn't to be found anywhere anymore and got a reply something about them no longer having the rights to the release - now I understand why.


thats dishonesty for you:rolleyes:
 
Agree totally, but how about those who claim to really care, such as audiophile reissue houses, e.g. Analog Productions? BS as well?

Apparently the definitions of "remastered" and "original" are very elastic in the biz: lots of people involved in reissuing this stuff neither know nor care what these terms mean. There are no set standards, no transparency, so...
 
I inquired Speakers Corner (who always use orig. analog masters when available) some years ago about their John Coltrane & Johnny Hartman release that suddenly wasn't to be found anywhere anymore and got a reply something about them no longer having the rights to the release - now I understand why.

Are your records cut from the original masters?
In our re-releases it is our aim to faithfully reproduce the original intentions of the musicians and recording engineers which, however, could not be realised at the time due to technical limitations.
Faithfulness to the original is our top priority, not the interpretation of the original: there is no such thing as a “Speakers Corner Sound”. Naturally, the best results are obtained when the original master is used. Therefore we always try to locate these and use them for cutting. Should this not be possible, – because the original tape is defective or has disappeared, for example – we do accept a first-generation copy. But this remains an absolute exception for us.
Are your records completely analogue?
Yes! This we guarantee!
As a matter of principle, only analogue masters are used, and the necessary cutting delay is also analogue. All our cutting engineers use only Neumann cutting consoles, and these too are analogue.

Speakers Corner 25 Years Pure Analogue This LP is an Entirely Analogue Production
 
A predictably long and fast-growing thread over on Steve Hoffman’s site. The suggestion being that pretty much the full Impulse and Chess catalogues have been lost along with mountains of other stuff. Clearly a tragedy from a historic perspective, these are high-points in human culture, though hopefully most of the music still exists digitally or on copy-masters elsewhere in the world.

It is also interesting to note just how many very high-price audiophile vinyl cuts of Impulse jazz titles and things like Muddy Waters Folk Singer have appeared since 2008. Hmmm....

PS Thinking about it I was getting confused saying I’d heard about this previously. I was certainly aware there was a fire ages ago that had lost a lot of Atlantic masters, this being why say Coltrane’s Atlantic albums in stereo don’t sound as good as they should as they are from copy masters. Also massive amounts of unreleased Ornette Colman material was lost in that fire. As such I’m getting the two events confused. Hopefully we are better prepared for this one and have good high-res digital for most of it. I still want to see a bloody list! What was in the Impulse archives that hasn’t been heard?

If you read the article fully, it's clear that the company didn't know what they had acquired from companies that they had taken over, that had in turn taken over multiple companies in the past. There ain't gonna be any list. Almost more hurtful is that anything that did survive, but is misfiled for any reason is also effectively lost. This is a real tragedy.
 
Almost more hurtful is that anything that did survive, but is misfiled for any reason is also effectively lost. This is a real tragedy.

That can surely be undone? I’d expect any surviving tapes to still be in their original boxes, and ones that aren’t could be identified by playing them. It wouldn’t be easy, but I don’t see it would be impossible given the importance of much of the material. Losing the back-catalogue of Impulse or even just Coltrane is the equivalent of losing the bloody pyramids or Stonehenge, it is some of humanity’s greatest achievements.
 
Sorry if this has been posted before but it seems a lot more original masters were destroyed than Universal wanted to admit.
https://www.dailynews.com/2019/06/1...ster-recordings-according-to-magazine-report/

"Other artists whose master recordings were destroyed include jazz greats Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie; blues masters Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy and Little Walter; and most of the original rock-defining recordings made at Chicago’s Chess Records label by Chuck Berry.

Some of Aretha Franklin’s earliest recordings also are believed to be among those destroyed, along with outtakes and never-released recordings by hundreds, if not thousands, of musicians, among them Elton John, Cat Stevens, Nirvana, the Eagles, Aerosmith, Steely Dan, Ray Charles, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Soundgarden, Hole, Eminem, 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg."
 
I can see this happening all over again when more and more people ditch their CD's and Vinyl, we'll be relying on streaming services to stay in business and 'when' they collapse the servers will all just get scrapped and all the music will be lost.
 
I can see this happening all over again when more and more people ditch their CD's and Vinyl, we'll be relying on streaming services to stay in business and 'when' they collapse the servers will all just get scrapped and all the music will be lost.

When the blues label Paramount went bust in the 1930s the laid off employees played frisbee with the stampers (so the story goes) hurling them into the river.

Some of that music now exists as a single known copy of the record. Other records remain lost.

History repeats itself.

OT but this book about obsessive pre-war blues collectors is an enjoyable read: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/145166706X/?tag=pinkfishmedia-21
 
This site contains affiliate links for which pink fish media may be compensated.
That can surely be undone? I’d expect any surviving tapes to still be in their original boxes, and ones that aren’t could be identified by playing them. It wouldn’t be easy, but I don’t see it would be impossible given the importance of much of the material. Losing the back-catalogue of Impulse or even just Coltrane is the equivalent of losing the bloody pyramids or Stonehenge, it is some of humanity’s greatest achievements.
You should dip into the SHF if you get a chance. There's a lot of debate about what was actually lost (possibly not as much of more modern stuff as first feared); but also more info about IM. Apparently it's practically impossible for the owner of the masters to get them out once they're in there. If you have the exact info on how it's filed, you get a copy of whatever is in the box you ask for. You apparently can't even get in to check the box, or the box next to it, assuming that they've been filed together! As I said earlier, a lot of that stuff has effectively gone as well.
 
There is a response from UMG via Billboard here. They, I guess predictably, downplay the loss claiming much was stored elsewhere and a lot that went up weren’t masters. I only hope they are right and most of the key stuff has survived.
 


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