• The Day the Music Burned
    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html
    It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business — and almost nobody knew. This is the story of the 2008 Universal fire.

    The archive in Building 6197 was UMG’s main West Coast storehouse of masters, the original recordings from which all subsequent copies are derived. A master is a one-of-a-kind artifact, the irreplaceable primary source of a piece of recorded music. According to UMG documents, the vault held analog tape masters dating back as far as the late 1940s, as well as digital masters of more recent vintage. It held multitrack recordings, the raw recorded materials — each part still isolated, the drums and keyboards and strings on separate but adjacent areas of tape — from which mixed or “flat” analog masters are usually assembled. And it held session masters, recordings that were never commercially released.

    #archives #master #multipiste #enregistrements