June 1, 2008, dawned on a tragedy for Hollywood when the Universal Studios backlot caught fire. At around 4:40 a.m., a fire erupted from the roof of a building on the New England Street set, which had been repaired nearly 40 minutes earlier. Flames leapt from building to building, engulfing iconic movie sets and theme park animatronics on the 400-acre lot.
Then, the fire spread to a 22,320-square-foot warehouse on the property. The building was known as the video vault to studio workers, and the majority of its space was for film reels and video. But 2,400 square feet were allocated and separated for Universal Music Group’s recording library.
This space was filled with 18-foot-high metal shelves, which were full of master tapes of historically significant music recordings. The chemical nature of film reels and tapes meant that the fire burned quick, hot, and devastating. It took dozens of fire trucks and countless firefighters more than 24 hours to finally extinguish the inferno. By that time, there was nothing to save. Most of the building had been demolished to aid in extinguishing the flames.
But when the fire made the news, the UMG vault was glossed over. The official line from Universal Studios focused on the film reels, of which there were more copies. Not much, if anything, was said about the music. The true cost of the devastation was kept under lock and key, and the news eventually moved on.
Years Later, the Truth Comes Out: Hundreds of Thousands of Recordings Destroyed
Not only was the reality of the devastation to the UMG vault kept hidden, it was actively denied by representatives. After a report on Deadline claimed 1,000s of original masters may have been lost, a clarification was published. This included a correction from an anonymous spokesperson for UMG.
“Thankfully, there was little lost from UMG’s vault,” they said. “A majority of what was formerly stored there was moved earlier this year to our other facilities. Of the small amount that was still there and waiting to be moved, it had already been digitized, so the music will still be around for many years to come.”
Essentially, as the entertainment world would come to find out, the damage was hidden behind blatant lies. The fire claimed original masters dating back to the 1940s, which could never be reproduced.
According to a 2019 report from The New York Times Magazine, UMG had several recording libraries across the country. But at the Universal Studios backlot, the vault held the company’s rarest and most prized recordings. There were masters from labels like Decca, Chess, MCA, Interscope, Geffen, ABC, and A&M, as well as smaller labels UMG had absorbed. Entire discographies, up in flames.
Official UMG records put the total number of “assets destroyed” at 118,230. The New York Times Magazine exposé included another estimate from UMG’s senior director of vault operations, Randy Aronson. According to Aronson, who was at the scene of the fire, the real loss was “in the 175,000 range.”
UMG stated that was “an estimated 500K song titles.” The monetary cost of the devastation? About $150 million. But the true cost was the profound loss of historical and artistic material that can never be replaced.
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