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Universal Vault Fire: HUGE loss to historical master recordings, including GN'R


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50 minutes ago, RussTCB said:

In the end, yeah, all we can do is guess. I just want to point out that you don't need the original masters to produce a 5.1 mix though. 

"remastered from original analogue tapes" and "remastered from the original master tapes" are two totally different things. 

That’s the thing - I thought they were the same thing! You learn something new every day. Bad times for the loss of all those tapes.

I wonder if Universal will get hammered with what appears to be similar to fraud?

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10 minutes ago, DTJ80 said:

That’s the thing - I thought they were the same thing! You learn something new every day. Bad times for the loss of all those tapes.

I wonder if Universal will get hammered with what appears to be similar to fraud?

I'm VERY curious about that last part myself. 

8 minutes ago, lame ass security said:

No kidding, it's amazing they were able to keep the extent of this under wraps for eleven years. Especially in this day and age.

It's extremely evident that their plan was to do exactly that. What a bummer this whole deal is. 

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6 minutes ago, lame ass security said:

No kidding, it's amazing they were able to keep the extent of this under wraps for eleven years. Especially in this day and age.

Not sure if they kept it under wraps or they were never really asked past the news cycle. I think mostly anyone involved with UMG/Vivendi and even NBC/Universal/General Electric knew the extent was most likely massive. 

I was living in LA at the time, and the word going around was that they thought everything was lost. With the bomb of the King Kong movie it made it even more cringe it was related to the freakin theme park ride  

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7 minutes ago, RussTCB said:

I'm VERY curious about that last part myself. 

It's extremely evident that their plan was to do exactly that. What a bummer this whole deal is. 

This is why I think we will find out what exactly has been destroyed - once the legal proceedings start (and I fully expect they will) then we will get a clearer picture.

Hell - Team Brazil’s legal minions.....THIS is what you should be tackling. And if they do, we will know exactly what has been destroyed.

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Doesn’t something like this come down to an artist owning their publishing, and therefore owning the masters? GNR always owned their publishing so probably had the masters from the start.

i remember Metallica only recently (in the last 10 years) bought their publishing rights from the label and got their masters.

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17 minutes ago, megaguns1982 said:

Doesn’t something like this come down to an artist owning their publishing, and therefore owning the masters? GNR always owned their publishing so probably had the masters from the start.

i remember Metallica only recently (in the last 10 years) bought their publishing rights from the label and got their masters.

Owning your own masters has nothing to do with where they're stored unfortunately. A band who owns their own masters isn't going to set up a storage facility capable of archiving them.

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13 minutes ago, Sweersa said:

A fun fact is piracy actually has saved the existence of some (usually older) movies, or previously lost films. 

I get what you're saying but we're not talking about copies of copies. We're talking about the original master recordings of a massive slice in music history being lost forever.

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1 hour ago, megaguns1982 said:

Doesn’t something like this come down to an artist owning their publishing, and therefore owning the masters? GNR always owned their publishing so probably had the masters from the start.

i remember Metallica only recently (in the last 10 years) bought their publishing rights from the label and got their masters.

Ownership of publishing (which has to do with the rights to the compositions) is different from ownership of the masters (=the recordings), and that's why the label could put out GH without needing the band's permission. Duff said recently that GnR will get full ownership of the recordings of AFD in 2022, iirc  (i.e. after 35 years - I guess that was the provision in their contract).

But anyway, this isn't relevant to the topic.

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57 minutes ago, ; D said:

Hopefully there were copies and nothing was completely lost forever 

Copies wouldn't matter much because they wouldn't be the originals. Any copy would suffer generational loss at the very least.

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54 minutes ago, megaguns1982 said:

Either way, major bummer if they e lost any masters let alone guns ones.

It's just an enormous loss. This is honestly the worst music related news I've heard in years. When you look over just the list of songs & artists from the article, it's just hard to believe.

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This sucks for music in general. I read the article at work. Russ thanks for posting it.  A few questions that I have. Why did the NY Times release this article now? What caused the interest to investigate further into this fire since it happened 11 years ago? 

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2 hours ago, Draguns said:

This sucks for music in general. I read the article at work. Russ thanks for posting it.  A few questions that I have. Why did the NY Times release this article now? What caused the interest to investigate further into this fire since it happened 11 years ago? 

You're welcome. It literally hurt my heart to have read this story this morning. But it's an important story to music fans in general and there's a GN'R connection, so I wanted to share. 

I think your questions might be answered by the second link as it's an article on the investigation itself. I haven't had time to dig into that article yet but I'm going to try tomorrow morning. 

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I just want to point out these resident evil movie trailers had Paradise City remixed for them, so maybe all isnt lost after all? At one point during the 2nd trailer, the snare and axls vocals are isolated, but it sounds a little different when everything comes back into the mix, so i dont knw if its just a snare sample or if its maybe just one of the snare mics isolated (which would cause it to have a different tone than it would with all the other mics mixed in)

 

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11 hours ago, RussTCB said:
12 hours ago, NeonKinight said:

 

I know, right. This is really, REALLY terrible news for music history. I don't think most people even grasp what this actually means and how big of a loss this is.

I finally got around to reading the articles you posted and I don't even know what to say. I can't even believe that we didn't know about this until now. That's so much history and content just gone.

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10 hours ago, DTJ80 said:

This is why I think we will find out what exactly has been destroyed - once the legal proceedings start (and I fully expect they will) then we will get a clearer picture.

Hell - Team Brazil’s legal minions.....THIS is what you should be tackling. And if they do, we will know exactly what has been destroyed.

I hope UMG get the pants sued off them by all the artists whose tapes are gone forever. They deserve it.

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16 hours ago, RussTCB said:

The masters for AFD & Lies could have been destroyed in that fire. I'm not overly familiar with the marketing but I don't remember any of the remastering saying anything about it being the original master recordings. Also, if the UYI masters were destroyed, that would suck.

 

Not of the original master recordings, no.

I know you're joking but what the bootleggers have doesn't compare in any way to the original masters. 

Well i'm assuming they have various transfers of the material, that's standard procedure as far as i'm aware; not in terms of older material, like Rock Around the Clock, which was recorded in much older mediums-the best they could probably do is lower quality transfers that were used for  re-releases, greatest hits etc. Even years ago, execs and engineers were not dumb enough to keep pulling from the masters and degrading the material. It's the same thing for film. I.E. whatever transfer was probably given to the digital intermediate for stuff like  the Greatest Hits record, or to the Guitar Hero III guys. 

Edited by UsedYourIllusion
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Good news - it is Universal and not 'our' Vault with all the po shots and sdb's from live gigs.

Also - not real loss, apart from the record company. For...You can bet anything destroyed there is something every artist has a copy of at home.

Do you honestly think they had reel that a copy off doesn't lay around in Ax/Slash/Duff/Iz home?

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