
The Day the Music Burned - pseudolus
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/magazine/universal-fire-master-recordings.html
======
tigeba
50 years from now the problem will be that we have preserved digital masters
in the form of session files for various DAWs and it will no longer be
possible to patch together the correct hardware, OS, plugins, and virtual
instruments to recreate the session. Artists and producers are encouraged to
create stems or bounces of all the individual tracks for the purposes of long
term preservation, but this does not always happen.

~~~
leoc
That's basically the reason Steve Albini gives for staying analogue:
[https://youtu.be/p-uziD9AvrI?t=822](https://youtu.be/p-uziD9AvrI?t=822) .
That said, in some respects I don't think (not an expert) the situation is
clearly worse than it was in the analogue days: it may be difficult to use or
replicate some DAW plugin effect in the future, but it's not as if some
studio's physical plate reverb unit, for example, was easy to replicate in
another place or at a later time either.

~~~
sexyflanders
Yeah probably more forward compatible to send/bounce wet effects to their own
tracks and print all the tracks as audio.

Then in worst case scenario you can load the raw WAV (or whatever format)
tracks in a future DAW.

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sizzzzlerz
Reading the list of jazz, soul, and rock artists whose material was lost just
made me shudder. If an example of cultural devastation is ever needed, this is
it. Jazz greats from the 40s and 50s. Popular music from the birth of rock and
roll to the modern day. This is truly a tragedy. Why wasn't this material
protected in, at least, a fireproof area, or, better, in some salt cave in the
Utah desert?

~~~
dehrmann
To be blunt, there's a lot of it and it's not actually that valuable. We've
had CDs for 30+ years. If there's an album UMG thought it'd be worth
digitizing, remastering, and reselling, they'd have done it by now.

Humanity generates information (works of art included) faster than it can be
reliably archived, and as that information ages and no one is interested in
it, it becomes less relevant. Maybe it's a bit nihilistic, but I've come to
accept humanity only has finite memory for a cultural canon, and things will
drop out of it over time.

~~~
freewilly1040
Yeah, most b-sides are b-sides for a reason.

~~~
DoubleCribble
As a counterpoint, here are the B-sides from that British quartet of
yesteryear, most of which were only released as singles (until the
discographies were published decades later). Some of these are better than the
A-sides. YMMV.

P.S. I Love You, Ask Me Why, Thank You Girl, I'll Get You, This Boy, You Can't
Do That, Things We Said Today, She's a Woman, Yes It Is, I'm Down, Day
Tripper, Rain, Yellow Submarine, Penny Lane, Baby You're A Rich Man, I Am the
Walrus, The Inner Light, Revolution, Don't Let Me Down, Old Brown Shoe, Come
Together, You Know My Name

~~~
sehugg
The Anthology series is also a really good example of using archive material
effectively. For example, you can see how songs like Strawberry Fields Forever
and Day in the Life evolved over multiple sessions.

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pseudolus
Over the years the film industry has suffered enormous losses as well, in part
because early movies used nitrocellulose based film stock which is highly
flammable and susceptible to spontaneous combustion. The 1937 Fox vault fire
is one of many examples of film loss that has continued to the present [0].
Sadly, the existence of a large number of silent movies is only known through
reviews, film posters and past recollections of participants. Similarly, a
great deal of video has been discarded, lost or reused. If I recall correctly
some of the earliest Dr. Who episodes have been lost because the media on
which they were recorded was reused.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Fox_vault_fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Fox_vault_fire)

~~~
jumelles
Not just Doctor Who; it was regular practice at the BBC to tape over old
broadcasts. Also reminds me how there's no audio of de Gaulle's Appeal of 18
June.

~~~
leoc
IIRC Doctor Who is in fact unusual in that audio recordings (fan tapings?)
survive of nearly all the lost episodes.

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xoa
Similar losses, though less dramatic and less all at once, have plagued the
software industry too and in particular video games. An enormous amount of
source code and assets for stuff made in the 80s and 90s in particular has
been lost for good, which makes it far more difficult to preserve and update
them. If there is some tiny silver lining possible out of these modern Library
of Alexandria permanent destruction of cultural heritage events, it's that
they might ultimately help push back against the IP maximalists and towards
better using digital advances for promoting science and the arts too. Beyond
reductions in term back towards something more sane (though attribution should
perhaps be split off), it would also be good to see a requirement that all
sources to produce a work must be submitted, encrypted, to the Library of
Congress (or similar) in order to qualify for copyright protection. Then they
could be preserved and released once the work enters public domain (or if
otherwise lost the copyright holder could request a copy for a fee).

Back when copyright was purely a product of the written word the ultimate
master information was also by definition included in every copy. It would
spread as part of sales, and upon leaving the period of monopoly could then
directly be utilized and fully contribute to further advanced culture. But
over time we've lost that without the laws adapting in turn, which has
resulted in real permanent losses.

Also, kudos to the Times for going back and investigating this and helping
bring it more to light, including explicitly calling out their own lacking
coverage at the time. That it was covered up so much by an organization that
has helped directly lobby for more protection is salt in the wound.

> _A skeptic might argue that this is as it should be. In the 140-odd years
> since Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, countless recordings have been
> made under the auspices of record companies. To conserve anything close to
> all those recordings has proved impossible; it may not even be desirable.
> The caretaking of canonical material, the Bings and Billies and Nirvanas,
> must naturally take priority. To ask that the same level of attention be
> lavished on all music, including stuff that holds interest only for
> obscurantists, is to demand a preservation standard that prevails in no
> other area of culture. If the sole vestiges of thousands of old recordings
> are a few stray 45s lining the shelves of collectors — perhaps that’s not a
> cultural tragedy, perhaps that’s a commercial-art ecosystem functioning
> properly._

This sounds like an argument for all of that having been moved into the PD
then long since and then letting culture at large take a shot at it all.

~~~
xamuel
>Back when copyright was purely a product of the written word the ultimate
master information was also by definition included in every copy.

Not strictly true. There is a difference between a copy of a Bach concerto and
the original score in Bach's own handwriting, even if the copy captures all
the notes perfectly. Original manuscripts can contain scratched-out parts
which are nevertheless of great interest to scholars (for example, Kafka
experts are deeply interested in every scratched-out word from Kafka's
originals). Handwriting can convey information about whether the author was
writing in a hurry, or had the luxury of taking her time. One could even
fantasize about discovering hidden messages encoded somehow in the original
handwriting, which would be totally lost in a naive word-for-word copy.

"See what large letters I am using to write to you with my own hand!"
(Galatians 6:11)

~~~
xoa
I actually did consider things like author's notes and background material,
but I stand by that not being the same as what you're describing anymore then
I'd consider preserving a software project to also have to include every
mailing list any dev posted to or all communications or whatever. Masters,
source code/raw assets, and so forth are still final products produced from a
development process, even if technical necessity then dictates they are then
"compiled" into something targeting specific mediums.

Author notes, drafts, and original manuscripts, just like processes around
music/movie/software production, can be interesting in their own right, but I
don't think it's in the same bucket or has the same cultural implications.

------
jdietrich
A lot of old master tapes self-destructed due to bad chemistry.

The binder material used to adhere iron oxide particles to the tape backing
was, in many cases, slightly hygroscopic; over time, the binder absorbs water,
breaking down that adhesion and causing the oxide to flake off when the tape
is unspooled. The only known remediation measure is to bake the tape at low
temperature, which will temporarily reduce the moisture content sufficiently
to allow the tape to be played back and re-recorded.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky-
shed_syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky-shed_syndrome)

------
ngcc_hk
Very impressive investigative reporting. Just a minor note. Whilst performance
this might be the greatest, a few phrase seems out of place. culture wise the
Alexandria suffer a bigger lost to humanity.

~~~
xamuel
The scale is different, but the permanence is the same, and that's very
profound because we tend to take it for granted that great works will no
longer be lost like they were in the past. It's interesting to think about
what will survive and what won't over a period of thousands of years. It seems
almost unthinkable that any of the main Beatles catalog could ever get lost,
library-of-Alexandria style. But on a scale of thousands of years, governments
and nations will change, nothing is certain, maybe the whole Beatles catalog
could indeed become permanently lost if the world gets taken over by dystopian
censors. On a long enough timescale, anything's possible.

------
WrathOfJay
That is a heroically long article of which all I don't really have time to
read, unfortunately. But it seems to me that these companies have an ethical
responsibility to ensure that this important art is not lost forever, even if
they technically own it and could ensure it never sees the light of day. What
a loss.

~~~
andrelaszlo
Just out of curiosity, would you have preferred reading it on paper? Long
reads on screens are not so fun imo.

~~~
dredmorbius
Printed to PDF the piece runs 36 pages, about 12,000 words, or roughly an
hour's read.

It is long.

~~~
andrelaszlo
Exactly, it's more like a short book than a regular article, pretty long even
by long-reads standard.

I was curious if people rather read content like this on paper than scrolling
for an hour on a screen :)

~~~
WrathOfJay
I stopped reading when the article turned toward a history of the guy Aronson.
I said to myself "Oh hell no, I'm not wasting my time reading about this guy I
don't care about", I looked at the scroll bar and nope'd out of the whole
article. Nothing to do with the delivery medium.

~~~
sifRAWR
That was my exact process too, got to that section about Aronson, saw the
scrollbar, and got out of there.

Looks like you followed my next step too, jumped into the comment section to
see if someone posted about an interesting highlight that I might have missed
by skipping the rest of the article :)

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code4tee
YouTube has a nice video of Brian May going thorough the master for Bohemian
Rhapsody. It gives a good idea of what’s on a master and also interesting
insights into how they overcame some of the technical limitations of equipment
at the time—like recording multiple times over the same track to make up for
limited channels on the tape-based system. Really interesting stuff.

------
easymodex
I'd actually say the biggest disaster in history of music is what.cd being
shut down. They had the largest collection of hard to find music, meticulously
curated and in lossless formats. I doubt there will ever be such a complete
collection and it was devastating to see it get killed like that.

~~~
mrbbk
I normally don't bother posting replies to comments on here, but I have to
point out that this is an unbelievably bizarre and wrongheaded interpretation
of the scale and depth of this disaster. Curated collections of lossless
streaming music are possible to recreate. Master tapes can NEVER BE RECREATED.
Comparing the loss of a collection of reproducible fungible audio files with
analog magnetic tape is misinformed at best and disingenuous at worst.

~~~
imtyler
I understand your point, but what good are master tapes if they're not
available to be heard? I think you could argue that destroying a musical
distribution network has the same effect as destroying music: it's no longer
available to be consumed.

~~~
mrbbk
Mastertapes contain the music precisely as recorded by the artist themselves.
They're not meant to be listened to or consumed actively -- they're there to
serve as indelible recordings and references. Scholarly work on Jazz, for
example, relies extensively on the existence of master tapes. Here's why:

When you record music to a multitrack magnetic tape like most of the
recordings in this vault, you then get the ability during playback, for
example, to fade individual tracks in and out. This would allow you to, e.g.
isolate the sound of _just_ McCoy Tyner's piano track on a classic Coltrane
recording. Hearing his playing on it's own, without the rest of the band,
could allow a music researcher to hear notes and sounds that might be masked
by the final product recording, which _flattens_ the recording.

One way of understanding this issue, which might appeal to the HN audience, is
this: The process of "flattening" tracks to make the final sound recordings
that we end up hearing as consumers is a lossy form of compression, even if
the sound file format you consume it in is described as "lossless."

~~~
magduf
That's all well and good, but the problem with this obsession with master
tapes is that they don't last forever, and degrade over time, along with every
time they're taken out and handled and run through a player to create another
"remaster" that has no dynamic range and lots of clipping distortion, since
that's apparently what consumers want these days.

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hnruss
Losing the master tapes is like losing the source code. As the years pass and
new OS versions are released, eventually that old executable will stop
working. Sure, you'll always be able to run it in a VM, but it'll never get
any better.

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deepaksurti
I read this as ‘The Day the Music Died’. [1]

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Music_Died](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Music_Died)

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RIMR
Blame Capitalism.

If one company weren't hoarding master copies of these works of art for the
purposes of profit, then the world would have lost nothing in that fire.

If music were owned by the people, we would never risk a single point of
failure wiping out musical heritage.

~~~
tomdell
Sure, if the people financed the creation of this music or purchased the
masters, then they could own the masters too. Would you expect Apple to put
its iPhones in the hands of the public for free and easy copying and
distribution? Why do you think music should be any different?

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harry8
I'm deeply concerned about the impact that this will have on the music
documentary. Without a fat idiot pulling a fader at a mixing desk in a poorly
lit room so we can just hear the drum beat alone while describing an utterly
standard 4/4 time, poorly played derivative drumming as "groundbreaking" I
fear for the genre. We've already lost atmospheric cigarette smoke haze, what
next?

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0815test
Biggest disaster? More like the _second_ -biggest disaster after the
conflagration that took down what.cd.

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i_am_nomad
Perhaps this will serve the same purpose fire does in a large, old-growth
forest.

~~~
jacquesm
I really don't see the analogy between the burning up of a library full of
unique material and a forest fire.

If you felt that the library of Alexandria burning down made life better
somehow for those that came after then I'm all ears.

~~~
LocalH
I can see it from the perspective of "well, now others can have that same joy
and accomplishment of rediscovery", which is a sort of a silver lining, I
guess. But I agree, such losses have far more negatives than positives.

