Variety By Chris Willman 6/25/2019
Lawsuits have been filed asking the Universal Music Group to come up with a complete accounting of recordings lost in the 2008 fire on the studio lot that destroyed untold thousands of master recordings, and UMG is unlikely to comply with those requests soon, for any number of practical or legal reasons. But the New York Times may have just provided a lot of the affected artists — and their attorneys — with a head start.
In a follow-up to the Times’ original investigative piece of two weeks ago, journalist Jody Rosen has dug deeper and reported a list of more than 700 additional artists whose tapes were destroyed, culled from UMG’s own “Project Phoenix†effort to assess what was lost in the months and years following the devastating blaze.
In an element of the story that veers toward tragicomedy, the Times reports that, at the time, Universal broke down the affected artists into “A†and “B†lists that did not necessarily correspond to Robert Christgau’s famous letter grades or any other artistic assessment. In the late 2000s, fleeting past or present superstars like the Pussycat Dolls, Limp Bizkit, Chuck Mangione and Whitesnake were on the A-list deemed among the company’s greatest losses, along with less historically assailable acts like Muddy Waters, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Joni Mitchell. The B-list included the likes of Merle Haggard, the Roots, Captain Beefheart and the Neville Brothers.
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https://variety.com/2019/music/news/universal-fire-list-artists-tapes-destroyed-new-york-times-1203253136/