Eminem tape reels are digitally backed up before the universal fire

Although the fire was widely reported in 2008, the Times reports that Universal Music, the world's largest record company, has hidden the astonishing magnitude of the loss to the public and even to artists affected. The center apparently would have housed master bands of music from Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, Nirvana, Tom Petty, Elton John, Ray Charles, George Jones and many others, according to the report. Times story.

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Universal has storage facilities throughout the country, and it is difficult to obtain complete bookkeeping of the cassettes in which the cassettes were stored at the time of the fire. This seems to be the case for Eminem: its representatives were not able to indicate Tuesday which of the rapper's master tapes could have been stored in the destroyed safe.

However, "I'm pretty confident that most of the masters, if not all, are saved," Eminem spokesman Dennis Dennehy told the Detroit Free Press.

In fact, these tapes seem to have been duplicated with difficulty on digital media just in time – a few months before the June 2008 disaster.

Joel Martin, operator of the 54 Sound studio in Ferndale and head of Eminem's former production team, the Bass Brothers, said his team had digitized all the tape reels in hand in early 2008. This included Eminem's music recorded at 54 Sound, like "The Marshall Mathers LP," "The Eminem Show" and hits such as "Lose Yourself" – with bands created in Los Angeles with producers such as Dr. Dre.

Martin said he was urged to undertake the "thorough process" of tape backup when Universal, Eminem's label, requested that all of the rapper's tapes be sent to L.A.

"These were ongoing efforts to bring together all the master tapes at the same place," Martin said. However, he noted, "I'm not sure where (Universal) kept them."

Rare video captures Eminem and the Bass Brothers 20 years ago at the release of "The Slim Shady LP" (Photo: Mandi Wright)

Backups, while vital, still do not match the original session reels – the first-generation tape contains the cleanest and most accurate document of the music. And digital media has its own long-term problems in terms of degradation and compatibility.

Nevertheless, Martin's backup effort included Eminem's 24-track raw cassettes, which contained all the vocals, instruments, rhythms, and other assorted sounds captured in isolation. This is crucial for future remixing projects and other uses of music that made Eminem the best-selling record artist in the first decade of the 2000s.

Eminem is not the only iconic figure in Detroit's music whose original recordings may have been destroyed in Universal's fire: the Times reports that the victims apparently include the master tape of the movie "Rock Around the Clock "from Bill Haley, Highland Park tops the Billboard standings to launch the era of rock 'n' roll.

And the first recordings of teenage girl Aretha Franklin – recorded gospel music at New Bethel Baptist Church in Detroit – were also "most likely lost" in the fire, the Times reports.

A previous calamity had already destroyed the masters and the multitrack for much of the Queen of Souls' best-known work: Her session was shooting for Atlantic Records in the 1960s, a body of work including songs like "Respect "and" Chain of Fools "" Were destroyed by a fire in a warehouse in New Jersey in 1978.

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