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Monday, June 02, 2008

UPDATED: Fire at Universal Studios

UPDATE: False alarm. Nevermind. Thanks to Idolator for the tip.

However, reports of Bo Diddly's death are sadly accurate.

It's kind of old news now, but in case you didn't hear, there was a fire at Universal Studios over the weekend. This wouldn't be news except this wasn't just a small fire somewhere on the property, this was a big one which, apparently, started on the back lot and ended up in the vault.

What got damaged? Well, they aren't exactly saying yet, but the reports I'm seeing look as is music masters stored in rented space in the video vault. (Uni Records is a separate organization from the film and TV Universal but were renting vault space from them. Confused yet?) According to this report, they managed to save the video backups but lost the music masters, which, apparently hadn't been backed up.

I know it's popular to pile on Uni and Doug Morris, I've done it here, and they usually deserve it. But, depending on how forward thinking they were about making safety copies, this could be a devastating loss for music lovers.

Anyway, I'll be curious to hear what the official statement is on this and what was lost.

2 comments:

Ryan said...

If they lost some irreplaceable masters, do you think they'll even bother telling anybody about the embarrassment? They've let plenty of films die on the shelves, what are a few recordings?

Rob G. said...

You have a very valid point and right after I posted this, I thought about if it even matters, in so far as how much more vault mining are they going to do in these days of bitching about the bottom line? If all the Carpenters masters are gone, as the linked article implies, there's still plenty of Carpenters CDs for anyone who wants them.