The scope of this calamity is laid out in litigation and company documents, thousands of pages of depositions and internal UMG files that I obtained while researching this article. UMG’s accounting of its losses, detailed in a March 2009 document marked “CONFIDENTIAL”, put the number of “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 of destroyed recordings stretches into the hundreds of thousands. In another confidential report, issued later in 2009, UMG asserted that “an estimated 500K song titles” were lost.
Among the incinerated Decca masters were recordings by titanic figures in American music: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland. The tape masters for Billie Holiday’s Decca catalog were most likely lost in total. The Decca masters also included recordings by such greats as Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five and Patsy Cline.
Jody Rosen
Fascinating story, both for the insights into the inner workings of the music industry, and for the sense of immeasurable cultural loss caused by a random fire – and the negligence of the former management at UMG. This reporting prompted a lawsuit by a group of artists seeking damages for the destructions of the masters, but that lawsuit was dismissed earlier this year on the grounds that the label owned the rights to artists’ original recordings, so their heirs are not entitled to damages – goes to show how little leverage artists have in their dealings with music labels.
It is sonic fidelity, first and foremost, that defines the importance of masters.
A master is the truest capture of a piece of recorded music, said Adam Block, the former president of Legacy Recordings, Sony Music Entertainment’s catalog arm.Sonically, masters can be stunning in their capturing of an event in time. Every copy thereafter is a sonic step away.This is not an academic point. The recording industry is a business of copies; often as not, it’s a business of copies of copies of 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” of the LP master — or even from a dubbed duplicate of that dubbed duplicate. Audiophiles complain that the digital era, with its rampant copy-paste ethos and jumble of old and new formats, is an age of 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 of the game of ‘Telephone’, says Henry Sapoznik, a celebrated producer of historical compilation albums.Who really would be satisfied with the sixth message in?
Making a photographic analogy, a master is equivalent to the film negative or digital RAW file, while distributed music files are akin to JPEG copies, degraded in quality and losing many of the finer details. You can always make a high-quality copy if you have access to the original RAW, but duplicating JPEGs will result in accumulating defects.
The resurgence of the record industry in the streaming era would seem to bode well for the cause of preservation. In 2017, Bruce Resnikoff, the head of UMG’s catalog division, told Billboard that “the catalog business is having its biggest expansion since the CD”. A report by BuzzAngle, which analyzes online music consumption, found that about half the music streamed on demand in the United States last year was “deep catalog”, songs three or more years old. A catalog boom could theoretically push labels to digitize more archival recordings. But a question remains as to how deep “deep catalog” extends. The old songs most listeners are streaming are either recent hits or classics by huge artists like the Beatles and Bob Marley. Labels may not see much incentive to digitize less-popular material.
Another positive consequence of the rise of streaming: it may incentivize record labels to digitize more of their legacy recordings and release them to the public. Even lesser-known performers could suddenly become popular in this modern age of nearly unlimited access to music.
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