According to Deadline Hollywood, the fire at Universal Studios destroyed some master recordings.
inside the video vault that was billowing thick black smoke were 1000′s of original Decca, MCA, ABC recording masters from the last century including a wide range of music from Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters to Judy Garland and The Carpenters.
“This is a tremendous loss in music history. A very sad day indeed. It’s too bad they saved the videos that they have backups on instead of the master recordings in which they do not, although they may not have had a choice since the fire had already engulfed much of the music side of the vault,”
Well, at some point, it would be interesting to know exactly what they had in there. The way I understand it, Universal Music was renting storage space and housing the masters there. It seems like a no-brainer to have all of that stuff backed up but, I also know that archival work like that is very time/labor intensive and Universal has to have a ton of stuff. Just no telling what was in there.
Billboard is now reporting that the masters are OK.
Contrary to online reports, “thousands of original recording masters” from the Decca, MCA and ABC labels were not destroyed in a fire on the Universal Studios lot in Los Angeles over the weekend.
“We had no loss, thankfully,” a Universal spokesperson tells Billboard. “We moved most of what was formerly stored there earlier this year to our other facilities. Of the small amount that was still there and awaiting to be moved, it had already been digitized so the music will still be around for many years.”
The spokesperson continues, “Moreover, in addition to being digitized, we also had physical back up copies of what was still left at that location, so we were covered.”
