Record Swap

The 2008 Universal Studios backlot fire is an infamous event for music business artists and insiders. “None of the masters are there,” said the COO at that time. Uh…….. not true, at least for the music.

A New York Times feature about the fire two years ago revealed the significance of the warehouse burning down, if not the true extent of the loss.

A year ago there was an update from the new management at UMG. It’s a lot of corporate spin that downplays the loss and provides no actual specifics. “Responding as quickly as possible”… twelve years after the event.

We are committed to responding as quickly as possible with complete transparency to any artist who inquires about master recordings in our archives. However, it can take weeks to conduct research on a single artist in order to present an accurate picture of the assets we have.

The music biz people I’m in touch with, who specialize in reissues from original master recordings, say the loss was far worse than the NYT was able to uncover. The fire was the result of simple and stupid carelessness by night shift workers.

That night, maintenance workers had repaired the roof of a building on the set, using blowtorches to heat asphalt shingles. They finished the job at 3 a.m. and, following protocol, kept watch over the site for another hour to ensure that the shingles had cooled. But the roof remained hot, and some 40 minutes after the workers left, one of the hot spots flared up.

I sent the NYT article to tastewar, and in return he sent this one to me. It’s about a rich Brazilian, named Zero Freitas, who’s been buying up every vinyl recording he can get, literally millions of them, regardless of genre.

What irony that a guy in Brazil, on his own, is doing more for the preservation of records than UMG did for the recordings they were in charge of protecting.

This reminds me of something that I was going to post a few years ago. Wait. A few years? Eight years ago! It’s Rutherford Chang’s White Album exhibit in New York.