Universal Music Group Fire Class Action Could Come Down to One Thing: Who Owns the Masters?

6/27/2019 by Colin Stutz

Artists want compensation for the destruction of their recordings, but their case isn't simple.

On June 21, a putative class action lawsuit was filed against Universal Music Group on behalf of artists whose master recordings are believed to have been destroyed in a 2008 fire on the Universal Studios backlot where they were stored. The main issue: To whom did the masters belong?

That suit -- brought by law firms King, Holmes, Paterno & Soriano, LLP, McPherson LLP and Susman Godfrey LLP representing Soundgarden; Hole; Steve Earle; Tom Petty's ex-wife, Jane Petty; and Tom Whalley (on behalf of the Afeni Shakur Trust, which oversees the estate of Tupac Shakur) -- seeks half of UMG's proceeds from a legal settlement and a reported insurance payment relating to the fire, plus half of whatever value they didn't cover. The case will come down to "good old American property rights," says an attorney who works for several legacy acts and estates that aren't part of the lawsuit. "As in, who owns the property?"

The plaintiffs assert that UMG breached its responsibility to protect the tapes lost -- which held as many as 500,000 songs, according to an investigation in The New York Times Magazine, although a UMG archivist said the damage was "overstated." But most recording contracts don't explicitly mention that responsibility, and there's a legal distinction between the physical recordings and the intellectual property they contain. Standard contracts give labels ownership of physical recordings, so UMG will presumably claim the property damaged was its own. (UMG declined to comment.) The lawsuit says these acts expect to reclaim the rights to their recordings under the reversion provisions of the 1976 Copyright Act -- which is not a settled issue, as major labels maintain the recordings are works for hire -- but the law says nothing about physical property.

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Here Are Hundreds More Artists Whose Tapes Were Destroyed in the UMG Fire

By Jody Rosen
June 25, 2019

In 2013, Bryan Adams, the Canadian singer-songwriter, found himself facing a mystery. Twenty-nine years earlier, in 1984, Adams reached pop-rock superstardom with the release of his fourth LP, “Reckless,” which topped the Billboard 200 album chart and sold an estimated 12 million copies worldwide. Now, with the album’s 30th anniversary approaching, Adams was attempting to put together a commemorative reissue. He reached out to Universal Music Group (UMG), the world’s largest record company, which controls the catalog of dozens of subsidiaries, including A&M, the label that put out “Reckless” and eight other Adams studio albums.

“I contacted the archive dept of Universal Music,” Adams told me in an email last week. Adams was seeking “the master mixes/artwork/photos/video/film . . . anything,” he wrote. Almost nothing could be turned up by the record company. Adams’s hunt for this material ranged far and wide. “I called everyone, former A&M employees, directors, producers, photographers, production houses, editors, even assistants of producers at the time,” Adams said.

Eventually, Adams located a safety copy of the album’s “unmastered final assembly mix tape” in his own vault in Vancouver. But he remained baffled about the disappearance of so much material: “I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that I couldn’t find anything at Universal that had been published to do with my association with A&M records in the 1980s. If you were doing an archaeological dig there, you would have concluded that it was almost as if none of it had ever happened.”

Two weeks ago, another explanation emerged, when Adams read “The Day the Music Burned,” a New York Times Magazine article detailing the destruction of recordings in a fire at a vault facility on the backlot of Universal Studios Hollywood, where UMG stored original masters and other recordings dating from the 1940s up to the 2000s. In legal documents and UMG reports that I obtained while researching the article, the record company asserted that more than 100,000 masters and “an estimated 500K song titles” had burned in the fire, including works by such towering figures as Billie Holiday, Chuck Berry and John Coltrane. The toll encompassed recordings made for several famous record labels: Decca, Chess, Impulse, ABC, MCA, Geffen, Interscope and Adams’ old label, A&M. A confidential document prepared by UMG officials for a 2009 “Vault Loss Meeting” offered a bleak assessment of the damage: “Lost in the fire was, undoubtedly, a huge musical heritage.”

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