Author Topic: The Day the Music Burned  (Read 1710 times)

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Online corbe

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The Day the Music Burned
« on: June 11, 2019, 03:09:17 pm »
The Day the Music Burned

Jody Rosen
 
6 hrs ago

 

Louis Armstrong, 1953.© Photo Illustration by Sean Freeman for The New York Times. Source photograph: Library of Congress, v... Louis Armstrong, 1953. 

1. ‘The Vault Is on Fire’

The fire that swept across the backlot of Universal Studios Hollywood on Sunday, June 1, 2008, began early that morning, in New England. At 4:43 a.m., a security guard at the movie studio and theme park saw flames rising from a rooftop on the set known as New England Street, a stretch of quaint Colonial-style buildings where small-town scenes were filmed for motion pictures and television shows. That night, maintenance workers had repaired the roof of a building on the set, using blowtorches to heat asphalt shingles. They finished the job at 3 a.m. and, following protocol, kept watch over the site for another hour to ensure that the shingles had cooled. But the roof remained hot, and some 40 minutes after the workers left, one of the hot spots flared up.

The fire moved quickly. It engulfed the backlot’s famous New York City streetscape. It burned two sides of Courthouse Square, a set featured in “Back to the Future.” It spread south to a cavernous shed housing the King Kong Encounter, an animatronic attraction for theme-park visitors. Hundreds of firefighters responded, including Universal Studios’ on-site brigade. But the fire crews were hindered by low water pressure and damaged sprinkler systems and by intense radiant heat gusting between combustible structures.

Eventually the flames reached a 22,320-square-foot warehouse that sat near the King Kong Encounter. The warehouse was nondescript, a hulking edifice of corrugated metal, but it was one of the most important buildings on the 400-acre lot. Its official name was Building 6197. To backlot workers, it was known as the video vault.

Shortly after the fire broke out, a 50-year-old man named Randy Aronson was awakened by a ringing phone at his home in Canyon Country, Calif., about 30 miles north of Universal City, the unincorporated area of the San Fernando Valley where the studio sits. Aronson had worked on the Universal lot for 25 years. His title was senior director of vault operations at Universal Music Group (UMG). In practice, this meant he spent his days overseeing an archive housed in the video vault. The term “video vault” was in fact a misnomer, or a partial misnomer. About two-thirds of the building was used to store videotapes and film reels, a library controlled by Universal Studios’s parent company, NBCUniversal. But Aronson’s domain was a separate space, a fenced-off area of 2,400 square feet in the southwest corner of the building, lined with 18-foot-high storage shelves. It was a sound-recordings library, the repository of some of the most historically significant material owned by UMG, the world’s largest record company.

<..snip..>

http://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/the-day-the-music-burned/ar-AACIbo2?ocid=ientp
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Offline EasyAce

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Re: The Day the Music Burned
« Reply #1 on: June 11, 2019, 09:14:18 pm »
This is without question the single worst property disaster in the history of the music business.

There are no words, really.


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Offline jmyrlefuller

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Re: The Day the Music Burned
« Reply #2 on: June 12, 2019, 11:14:25 am »
Tapes are flammable; they always have been. Besides, they're difficult to copy perfectly without introducing flaws, as is the case with any analog system. It is literally impossible to preserve an analog master, the only true record of a performance, forever. In the best case, it will deteriorate; in the worst, it will burn.

There are countless films that have deteriorated or burned that are lost forever because they could not be saved before the digital era, and that's not even counting the ones that were deliberately thrown out because they weren't seen as valuable. The music in the Universal vault was spared that fate because it was transferred to digital, which can be copied perfectly, quickly and at marginal cost from one storage medium to another. That foresight spared this minor inconvenience from becoming a major tragedy.

So Ms. Rosen can spare us the caterwauling because these things happen, whether we like it or not; they're never completely avoidable, and we're incredibly lucky to have been able to save the material in as near-perfect form as possible before it did.
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