Universal Fire in 2008 Estimated to Have Destroyed 500,000 Iconic Master Recordings

, including from a Universal spokesperson who told Billboard "we had no loss," adding that the company had recently moved "most" of the stored material on the movie lot to other facilities. Elsewhere in its statements, the company did infer that some physical items didn't make it, but that digital copies were already made.

Master tapes are large reels of magnetic tape containing the original audio recordings, from which all subsequent copies are derived. “Sonically, masters can be stunning in their capturing of an event in time," former Legacy president Adam Block told theIn addition to the Universal backlot, UMG had tape archives in a separate location in Los Angeles, in Pennsylvania, near Nashville and in upstate New York.

Five years before the Universal lot fire, UMG averted another catastrophe at its warehouse in New Jersey when overloaded pallets of salad dressing rained down from an upstairs tenant, rupturing pipes as they fell through the ceiling and spreading water and dressing in a vault holding 350,000 master tapes, notably including the entire Motown catalog.

Following the Jersey incident, Aronson said he was successful in urging UMG to move the majority of the backlot's session reels and multitracks -- roughly 250,000 tapes -- to the Pennsylvania archives. The 120,000 to 175,000 masters that remained in Building 6197 were the recordings that went up in flames in June 2008.

While UMG worked to downplay the fire's damage to the press, internally the staff knew it was bad. Very bad. In a March 2009 memo for a meeting on vault losses, the company didn't mince words: "The West Coast Vault perished, in its entirety... Lost in the fire was, undoubtedly, a huge musical heritage."

juliamordaunt Hope they made copies.

Damn......

What a loss 😱

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