Other artists listed in the documents are offering accounts of interactions with UMG similar to those reported by Bryan Adams, in which the record company appears to have fallen short of complete candor. These incidents are reported by artists to have taken place after many of the executives who presided over UMG at the time of the fire had departed, and well into the tenure of the current CEO and chariman, Lucian Grainge.

Early last year, the alternative rock group Semisonic was preparing a 20th-anniversary edition of its 1998 album “Feeling Strangely Fine.” According to drummer Jacob Slichter, the band was informed by UMG that masters of the album “couldn’t be located.” In an email to The Times, Semisonic’s manager, Jim Grant — whose office requested the masters from UMG — said that the record company “did not reference lost or damaged masters. . . . They did not mention anything about the fire.” Semisonic was included on one of the UMG documents listing artists whose masters were thought to have been destroyed in the fire.

Another leading ’90s band that appears in the documents is Counting Crows, which recorded several albums for Geffen. In a 2016 interview in Diffuser, a music website, the lead singer, Adam Duritz, said that Geffen had “lost the master tapes” for “Recovering the Satellites,” the band’s platinum-selling 1996 release. “Geffen, because they’re a record company, it’s their sovereign right to lose everything,” he said. Duritz could not be reached for comment. It is unclear how he learned about the lost masters or if he was told that the tapes might have been lost in a fire.

One of the only musicians who has said publicly that he was informed about the destruction of his masters is Richard Carpenter of the Carpenters, the star ’70s pop duo. But Carpenter says the admission — by a staff member at UMG’s catalog division, Universal Music Enterprises (UMe) — came only after multiple inquiries and because UMG was forced into it: Carpenter had booked time at a mastering studio to work on a reissue for the label, and the tapes he requested for the session hadn’t shown up. “They didn’t let me know,” he told me last week. “They really didn’t want to get me on the phone to give me this news.” In a deposition given in a negligence suit brought by UMG against NBCUniversal, its landlord at the backlot vault, a former executive for the record company testified that Carpenter’s persistence and “concern” about his masters in the aftermath of the fire had been a subject of consternation among UMG officials.

Asked last week if there had been any systematic effort to inform artists of losses in the 2008 calamity, a UMG spokesperson said that the company “doesn’t publicly discuss our private conversations with artists and estates.” Its apparent success in keeping news of the fire from recording artists may in part be ascribed to the long history of anarchic archival practices in the music business: Musicians have come to expect that labels may not be able to find their masters, which in most cases are owned outright by the labels.

But novel arguments regarding masters and the intellectual property they contain may soon be advanced in cases against UMG. The suit filed Friday is not the only one that UMG is facing. In February, a separate class action was filed against UMG concerning Section 203 of the 1976 Copyright Act, which gives artists a chance to reclaim some rights to their sound recordings after a period of 35 years by serving Notices of Termination to record companies. The plaintiffs in Waite vs. UMG Recordings Inc. include, among others, singer John Waite, members of the California punk-rock band the Dickies and country-rock veteran Joe Ely. (Ely, who released eight albums on MCA between the 1970s and 1990s, appears in UMG’s documentation of losses in the fire.)

The plaintiffs’ lawyers, Evan Cohen and Maryann Marzano, now say that they view any losses suffered by artists in the fire “as a natural component of our claims.” “The destruction of the master recordings caused by the 2008 fire, and UMG’s subsequent failure to notify recording artists that their works were tragically lost, further underscores how little regard UMG has for the rights and property of musicians,” they said in a statement provided to The Times.