Hole masters weren’t destroyed in Universal warehouse fire

Courtney Love’s band have reportedly been informed by Universal Music Group (UMG) that none of their masters were destroyed in the fire.
Hole joined Soundgarden, Steve Earle, and the estates of Tupac Shakur and Tom Petty to sue UMG for losses stemming from a 2008 Universal Studios Hollywood fire, which destroyed a massive quantity of master tapes by a number of iconic artists including Eminem, Nirvana, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Elton John, Ella Fitzgerald and Judy Garland.
However, according to editors at Variety, Hole have now been dropped from that lawsuit.
An amended complaint, filed on Friday (16Aug19), dropped Hole as a plaintiff “based on UMG’s written assurances to Plaintiffs’ counsel that no Hole master recordings were lost in the fire.”
The complaint continues: “At present Plaintiffs are not aware of information contradicting those recent assurances regarding Hole.”
The lawsuit sought $100 million (£82.6 million) in damages. The plaintiffs claimed that Universal breached contracts by failing to protect the masters and should have shared any settlement funds with artists.
In a new statement, UMG announced intentions to provide artists with “full transparency.” They continued: “We have already determined that original masters for many of the artists named in the lawsuit were not lost in the 2008 fire.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyer Ed McPherson fired back: “Well, isn’t that great! After 11 years of assuring artists that basically nothing was lost in the fire, UMG is actually conducting an investigation to see what was lost in the fire.”
The news of the huge loss was made public following an investigative report published in The New York Times in June.