On June 1, 2008, a fire broke out on the backlot of Universal Studios Hollywood, an American film studio and theme park in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles County, California. The fire began when a worker used a blowtorch to warm asphalt shingles that were being applied to a facade. The worker left before checking that all spots had cooled, and as a result, a three-alarm fire broke out. Nine firefighters and a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy sustained minor injuries. The fire was extinguished after 24 hours.
Universal Pictures said the fire destroyed a three-acre (1.2 ha) portion of the Universal backlot, including the attraction King Kong Encounter and 40,000 to 50,000 archived digital video and film copies. A 2019 exposé from The New York Times Magazine asserted that the fire also destroyed 118,000 to 175,000 audio master tapes belonging to Universal Music Group (UMG), Universal's former division and NBCUniversal's then-sister company through Vivendi, a shareholder with General Electric until 2009. This included original recordings belonging to some of the best-selling artists worldwide. UMG disputed the report, though the CEO, Lucian Grainge, acknowledged that "the loss of even a single piece of archived material is heartbreaking".
On June 1, 2008, a three-alarm fire broke out on the Universal Studios Lot, the backlot of Universal Studios. The fire started when a worker was using a blowtorch to warm asphalt shingles being applied to a facade. Among the structures damaged by the fire were mock New York and New England streets, the King Kong Encounter attraction, the Courthouse Square featured in Back to the Future and the Universal video vault.
The Los Angeles County Fire Department (LACoFD) sent 516 firefighters, as well as two helicopters dropping water. Nine firefighters and a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy sustained minor injuries. The fire took at least 12 hours to extinguish, in part because of the low water pressure due to the low capacity of Universal's pipes; firefighters had to tap streams and lakes. The fire was extinguished after 24 hours.
Universal executives initially said the fire destroyed 40,000 to 50,000 archived digital video and film copies of Universal movies and television shows, some almost a century old, and including the films Knocked Up and Atonement, the NBC series Law & Order, The Office, and Miami Vice, and the CBS series I Love Lucy. Universal Studios president Ron Meyer told the media that "nothing irreplaceable was lost" and that the company already possessed duplicates of everything that had been destroyed. Universal replaced the King Kong attraction with King Kong: 360 3-D, based on the 2005 King Kong film.
In June 2019, The New York Times Magazine published an investigative article by freelance journalist Jody Rosen that alleged that the damage was far more serious than originally reported, as Meyer's statement only referred to material owned by Universal Studios.
The fire destroyed Building 6197, a warehouse adjoining the King Kong attraction. In addition to more videos, it housed a huge archive containing multiple copies of audio and video recordings, documents ranging from legal papers to liner notes, and packaging materials and artwork belonging to Universal Music Group (UMG). The collection included the catalogues of UMG's West Coast labels including Chess, Decca, MCA, Geffen, Interscope, A&M, Impulse!, and their subsidiary labels.
Rosen estimated the individual items lost range from 118,000 to 175,000 album and 45-rpm single master tapes, phonograph master discs, lacquers (also known as acetates), and all the documentation contained in the tape boxes. The article alleged some tapes contained unreleased recordings such as outtakes, alternative versions of released material, and instrumental "submaster" multitracks created for dubbing and mixdown. However, UMG found only one unreleased album potentially affected in the fire, and they located multiple copies of that recording and could still release that album in the future if the artist wishes to. Randy Aronson, manager of the vault at the time, estimates that the masters of as many as 500,000 individual tracks were lost.
Rosen argued master recordings are irreplaceable, even if copies exist, because the original recording "contains the record's details in their purest form," citing Andy Zax, a Grammy-nominated producer and writer who works on reissued recordings. UMG stated that even when the original master is available, the company often works from duplicates or digitized versions because the fidelity of the original master has deteriorated from overuse or from chemical interactions over time or for other technical reasons. UMG said it reissues thousands of recordings a year, and each project presents a unique set of challenges to overcome. In each case, UMG's team of experts use the highest fidelity recordings possible.
Among the possible losses were the entire AVI Records catalog, all of Decca's masters from the 1930s to the 1950s, most of the original Chess masters, which included artists such as Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, and Howlin' Wolf, as well as most of John Coltrane's master tapes from his period signed to Impulse! Records. On Twitter, Rosen stated that the Coltrane masters were among the most checked-out Impulse! items in the vault, and a source had told him that the masters for A Love Supreme were likely elsewhere during the fire.
Two weeks later, Rosen wrote a follow-up article, listing at least 700 additional artists named in internal UMG documents as possibly affected. Determining which recordings had been destroyed, or how much of an artist's discography had been affected, was impossible, he wrote. For example, Rosen said it was difficult to confirm whether the Neil Young recordings listed in the documents were the original master tapes of the albums he recorded for Geffen Records in the 1980s, or session outtakes from those records. Rosen tweeted that the documents also listed several Broadway cast recordings among the tapes destroyed. Several nonmusical audio recordings were reported as destroyed, including the original recording of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 "Remaining Awake During a Great Revolution" sermon delivered at the Washington National Cathedral.
In his second article, Rosen acknowledged he could not definitely state that any master recordings had actually been lost in the fire, stating "It is not possible to assert definitively which masters were burned in the fire, nor can it be said categorically that all of these artists did in fact lose masters. It also cannot be determined exactly how many of the destroyed masters were primary-source originals."
Bryan Adams, Semisonic drummer Jacob Slichter, and Counting Crows singer Adam Duritz said they had been told that UMG had misplaced their tapes. In the early 2020s, HBO approached Geffen Records to make a documentary on Counting Crows and the label found all of the masters, confirming they had not been destroyed. Richard Carpenter told the Times he had been informed about the destruction of his tapes by a UMG employee while he was working on a reissue, and only after Carpenter had made multiple, persistent inquiries. Following the publication of Rosen's articles, several affected musicians posted reactions on social media, with some noting specific tapes that may have been lost. For instance, singer-songwriter Jill Sobule said she had lost two masters in the fire, including tapes for an unreleased album produced by Joe Jackson, but Sobule later said UMG informed her that none of her tapes had been lost, including the unreleased album.
Several other artists also contradicted The Times' reporting, stating their recordings had not been affected by the fire. Nirvana said on Twitter that all of their tapes are safe as did Sheryl Crow, with UMG confirming, "masters for all of Crow's A&M-released albums survived the fire." The Canadian band the Tragically Hip reported on their website that The New York Times incorrectly listed them among those who had lost tapes in the fire. Drummer Johnny Fay wrote that all of their material had been relocated to Canada in 2001. Beck posted that his losses were minimal and that none of his master recordings had been lost. Smash Mouth confirmed their recordings were not destroyed.