The most remarkable thing to me about the 2008 warehouse fire that the NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE has dubbed "the biggest disaster in the history of the music business," besides the apparent magnitude of the archival losses—multitrack master tapes of JOHN COLTRANE, CHUCK BERRY, ARETHA FRANKLIN, RAY CHARLES, SISTER ROSETTA THARPE, GEORGE JONES, ELTON JOHN, TUPAC, "the complete discographies of entire record labels," the original recording of ETTA JAMES' "AT LAST," so much more—is that the UNIVERSAL MUSIC GROUP doesn't seem to have told a lot of the artists whose work was incinerated. A sampling of reactions to JODY ROSEN's epic account of the fire on the UNIVERSAL STUDIOS backlot: The band HOLE "was not aware until this morning," a rep told PITCHFORK. REM is "trying to get good information to find out what happened and the effect on the band’s music, if any." ASIA's GEOFF DOWNES: "This might explain why nobody can find the original Asia masters." KRIST NOVOSELIC on the multitracks of NIRVANA's NEVERMIND: "I think they are gone forever." Others seem to have had varying amounts of knowledge about a tragedy that's been an open secret in the music business for years. "We have been aware of 'missing' original STEELY DAN tapes for a long time now," manager IRVING AZOFF said in a statement. "We've never been given a plausible explanation. Maybe they burned up in the big fire." QUESTLOVE retweeted the Times story "for everyone asking why DO YOU WANT MORE & ILLDELPH HALFLIFE wont get reissue treatment." At one point, the ROOTS drummer wrote, someone went looking in the vaults for unreleased songs and mixes from those two '90s albums and discovered that artists filed under the letters B–F and O–S "took a hit the most." Rosen's article is a crucial and compelling read not only on the fire and its confusing aftermath, but on the primacy of analog tape, the importance of archiving musical history (and the dangers of neglecting it), the consequences of industry consolidation, and the power of one particularly large company to keep the public and even its own artists and labels in the dark about a large conflagration in the middle of Los Angeles. Rosen details a corporate effort to hide the massive losses from newspapers and trade publications across the country by, among other things, feeding them the names of "two artists nobody would recognize" as examples of the kind of material that was lost. As if that was the worst of it. And that was just the press. "It is probable," Rosen adds, "that musicians whose masters were destroyed have no idea that a vault holding UMG masters had burned down." The company declined to discuss that or much else with Rosen; hours after the story was published, UMG accused the Times of "numerous inaccuracies" and "fundamental misunderstandings." But the company did not, curiously, deny the loss of the masters of a half million songs representing large chunks of music history. It touted, instead, its commitment to preservation and its continued release of "master-quality, high-resolution, audiophile versions" of many of the recordings cited by the Times. Which is, to quote my friend BILL WERDE at SYRACUSE's BANDIER PROGRAM, a classic "non-denial denial." If the masters themselves still exist, UMG is not saying. Draw your own conclusions. For some lesser-known labels and artists, the ones whose work has been long out of print and never digitized for download and streaming platforms, that could well mean songs and albums have been lost forever. Vanished. Disappeared. Archival music producer and writer ANDY ZAX tweeted Wednesday about a1975 album by soul great CHARLES WRIGHT that's gone save for a single remaining copy on 8-track tape. For more familiar and popular artists, the music of course is and will always be easily available. More available than ever. But many of the original tapes on which it was first recorded, the first generation copies, the truest versions of what happened in studios in the 1940s or '60s or '90s, the once from which the remixes and reissues and master-quality high-res audiophile versions should come, are lost. Those songs and albums exist now as copies for which there are no originals, prints for which the templates have been destroyed... In Thursday's MusicREDEF: Reflections on music archives. In the meantime, this 2014 essay by Andy Zax is highly recommended, and frightening... And, hey, on the subject of archives: MARTIN SCORSESE's ROLLING THUNDER REVUE: A BOB DYLAN STORY drops today on NETFLIX and in a handful of theaters... And RADIOHEAD, responding to the theft and leak of 18 hours worth of OK COMPUTER era demos (and a reported demand for ransom), has gone ahead and released all of it on BANDCAMP, where it will be available for £18 for 18 days, with proceeds going to a climate-change charity.