Pat Kraus, UMG Senior VP Recording Studios and Archive Management

Dear Colleagues,

I’m writing to provide you with another update on our continuing efforts to provide artists with information as to the archived assets in our facilities and, particularly, which, if any, of those assets may have been lost in the 2008 fire at the NBCUniversal Studios lot. On behalf of my entire team, I want to thank the many artists and artist representatives whose collaboration with our team in performing this time-intensive work has been invaluable.

Before I get to the specifics, let me briefly describe the context for our work:

What we refer to as the "assets" in our archives consist of far more than original audio recordings. The bulk of the material consists of protection and other secondary copies, safeties, and videos, as well as non-recorded items such as artwork, session notes and more. If an original recording (i.e., a multitrack master or flat mix master) is ever lost, various alternatives typically exist to make up for that loss. In fact, even when an original recording is available, we may choose to work from duplicates or digitized versions when the fidelity of the original tape may have, over time, become unusable for technical reasons.

Back in June, the New York Times Magazine published two articles about the fire. Regardless of how or why The Times came to the conclusion that a particular original recording was destroyed—whether they were relying on contemporaneous lists that were based on estimates and guesswork at the time of the fire, or whether they fundamentally misunderstood the information they obtained--the bottom line is that through the exhaustive work by our team of more than 70 specialists, we are able to provide more accurate information to artists for whom our analysis has been completed.

We prioritize our work based on requests from artists and their representatives, given that it can take as long as several weeks to analyze potentially thousands of assets for a given artist. The Times published a list of 830 artist names and stated or implied that those artists lost original recordings in the fire. Of the 392 inquiries that we’ve received so far, my team and I have reviewed more than 150,000 assets and responded to 209 of those artists. So far, less than 0.1 percent of those assets might have been original recordings affected by the fire.

Does that mean those recordings are lost forever? Absolutely not. For the very few original recordings we believe were impacted, almost all had previously been commercially released and we have located safeties, copies or digital alternatives for every single album. In the one instance where an unreleased album was affected, we have located multiple copies and we could still release the album if the artist wishes. We are also currently working with a few artists and estates to locate masters and copies that may exist in their archives.

You may have noticed that some artists have already made public statements about the status of masters based upon our review, with many expressing relief that The Times’ reporting was inaccurate. As I noted in my last update, each artist will decide if they wish to publicly release information that we convey to them.

I don’t want to make this process sound either clinical or triumphant. This is emotionally charged, often painful, work. Many artists and estates were justifiably horrified by the report suggesting that original recordings were lost. As archivists, we understand their concern: we’ve devoted our lives to the preservation of music. As Sir Lucian has said, the loss of even one asset from our archives is heartbreaking.

Our work is not yet done. We continue to meticulously review assets in our facilities around the world and will live up to our commitment to be transparent and respond to every artist or artist's representative’s inquiry. We have extended invitations to visit our facilities to a number of artists who are interested in seeing the tapes for themselves.

Again, I am are enormously grateful to those artists and their representatives who have cooperated with us in our review and to the teams across the company who are dedicated to this project. As our work continues, I will continue to provide future progress reports.

Finally, I’ve included below an updated list of questions we are most frequently asked by artists and their representatives. Should you receive any others, please send them to me and we will answer them as quickly as possible.

Thank you.

Pat