As UNIVERSAL MUSIC and a group of disgruntled artists continue to work through the legal implications of a poorly documented warehouse fire from 11 years ago, and as the rest of us work through the cultural implications of all that may have been lost, Los Angeles writer SAM SWEET is here to tell the story of another poorly documented archival musical loss, this one from water not fire, and how all was not lost in the end, and how some long-forgotten New Orleans treasures made their way, improbably, to the garage of MIKE NISHITA, a DJ-turned-storage-wars-soldier (and brother of BEASTIE BOYS keyboardist MONEY MARK NISHITA) who found them at a swap meet in Southern California. This is the alternate-universe QUENTIN TARANTINO version of the Universal fire story, involving lesser-known American treasures (ALLEN TOUSSAINT! THE METERS! LEE DORSEY!), a biblical flood, reel-to-reel tape machines, an 80-year-old collector of music catalogs who owns "some valuable rights" and "a lot of not-so-valuable rights," and a travelogue's worth of plot points you wouldn't buy if someone had made them up. The ending, which will hopefully involve you, me and everyone else actually hearing this music, has yet to be written, because of what Sweet notes is a "jigsaw puzzle" of rights issues. So for now you'll just have to imagine the soundtrack to what, for my money, is the true musical tall tale of the year... "The ticketing industry is broken," write US senators AMY KLOBUCHAR and RICHARD BLUMENTHAL in asking the Justice Department to investigate competition in the ticketing business and to extend and more strictly enforce a consent agreement intended to restrict LIVE NATION and TICKETMASTER's dominance of the market. "The losers," the senators say, "are the American people." Live Nation says the senators have "a fundamental misunderstanding of our consent decree and general ticketing industry dynamics"... "OLD TOWN ROAD" isn't going to compete for Song or Single of the Year at the CMA AWARDS in November, but the song that Nashville told to go away did earn one nomination for one of the biggest nights on the country music calendar. LIL NAS X and BILLY RAY CYRUS are up for Musical Event of the Year. MAREN MORRIS leads all performers with six nominations including Album of the Year, Single of the Year, Song of the Year and Female Vocalist of the Year, but isn't nominated for Entertainer of the Year because, um, does someone in Nashville want to explain that one? Can you do it without using the word "female" or "woman"? GARTH BROOKS, whose last studio album came out in 2016 but who did play a bunch of stadiums this year, is nominated and is a man... VARIETY's "Music Moguls of the Year" are JAY & BEY, NICK CANNON and—LOL—SCOOTER BRAUN and TAYLOR SWIFT... RIP DONNIE FRITTS... And a correction: In Wednesday's newsletter, I mentioned that a prosecutor in Switzerland will not appeal A$AP ROCKY's suspended sentence. A$AP Rocky was arrested and tried in Sweden, not Switzerland. They are different countries. With different court systems and different music. My apologies.