The UMG Fire of 2008 Was Worse Than We Thought

[Joe Muscara]

You may have seen the original article The Day the Music Burned documenting the 2008 fire that destroyed a UMG vault with lots of music inside, going back decades.

 

Here's a follow up, documenting UMG not telling artists over the years what happened ("I want to do a reissue, where are the masters?" "Uh, we don't know. I guess we lost them?") and the artists only found out when the above article hit. The end of the article is

many but not all of the acts believed by UMG officials to have lost master recordings in the fire. It is a partial selection, culled from three separate UMG lists prepared for Project Phoenix in late 2009 and early 2010, more than a year and a half after the fire struck. These UMG lists were part of the companys effort to compile what was referred to internally as the God List, a total tally of the material lost in the fire. The lists appear in company emails and other documents, a paper trail that emerged in later litigation. In one court filing in the NBCUniversal suit, UMGs lawyers characterized the lists as the result of a resource-intensive project to identify with reasonable certainty the Destroyed Tapes.

 

 

Here Are Hundreds More Artists Whose Tapes Were Destroyed in the UMG Fire