More recently, Nirvana, Sheryl Crow, and rappers Eminem, Tupac Shakur and 50 Cent are among the affected artists. A decade later, losses include Guns N’ Roses, Sting and Janet Jackson. The Seventies victims include the Eagles, Tom Petty and Aerosmith. The master recordings of Sixties icons including Burt Bacharach, Neil Diamond and Sonny and Cher are all gone. More modern artists such as Sheryl Crow, pictured also saw their work destroyed The first commercially released material by the late Aretha Franklin, recorded when she was a young teenager performing in her pastor father’s church services, is also ‘very likely lost’, says the New York Times. Almost all of Buddy Holly’s masters were lost, as were those of Chuck Berry. Those recordings in the revered Decca Records collection dated back to the late Forties and included Judy Garland and Billie Holiday. The list of what’s gone in the Universal conflagration - or assumed to be gone, given that nobody knows precisely what was there - is almost endless. ‘A master is the truest capture of a piece of recorded music, every copy thereafter is a sonic step away,’ said Adam Block, the former president of Legacy Recordings, Sony Music Entertainment’s catalogue arm. The master recordings also often include ‘session masters’, separate recordings that were never commercially released and which might never have been heard again after they were recorded. The master holds the so-called multi-track recordings: the raw individual elements of a song in which each instrument - drums, keyboard, strings - remain isolated from each other in separate sections of the tape. A ‘master’, initially recorded on analogue magnetic tape and in digital form more recently, is a unique musical artefact whose loss is irretrievable.
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