It has been reported that Sheryl Crow is the most recent artist to come forward and confirm that her masters were destroyed in the 2008 Universal Music Group fire.
Crow joins an unfortunately long list of artists who are only now learning about the loss of their catalogs. Janet Jackson, The Eagles, No Doubt, Nine Inch Nails, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell have lost tapes as well as musical icons Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and Dolly Parton.
“It absolutely grieves me,” Crow said in a recent interview. “I can’t understand, first and foremost, how you could store anything in a vault that didn’t have sprinklers? And secondly, I can’t understand how you could make safeties and have them in the same vault. I mean, what’s the point?”
She added, “And thirdly, I can’t understand how it’s been 11 years. I mean, I don’t understand the cover-up.”
Crow says she learned this week through an article published in The New York Times Magazine that all her masters were destroyed when a music archive went up in flames in Los Angeles over a decade ago.
UMG is currently facing several class-action lawsuits filed by countless singers and estates over the loss of music.
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