This isn't even the worst outcome. There are hundreds of video games that are never re-released at all and have never been available for sale digitally, entirely because of soundtrack licensing.

There is a similar case with Top Gear. Aside from the popularity of Clarkson/May/Hammond and the fantastic cinematography, the show had great editors with an ear for soundtracks. Unfortunately it seems a lot of the tracks were only licensed for broadcast TV and the DVDs have some stock music where the rights were no longer available. There are also some gags which don't work any more because the audio doesn't make sense.

I believe the only place you can watch them as originally produced is iPlayer, but at least the BBC has copies somewhere.

It's a shame they never released the full series on DVD (or blu-ray). Most of it is available if you consult a chart of all the releases, but they've been cut and rearranged to fit on discs, and the soundtrack is as you say. I imagine they didn't due to problems like this at the time, but after the scandal and with how much time has passed, they'll never actually bother, unless someone straight up steals/copies the broadcast tapes from the archives and do us all a favour.

I assume you mean the only place you can legally watch them

I think it’s true for a lot of BBC shows, many had great music, but the BBC also ran hugely popular radio stations and i think it was through that they were able to license a large amount of music.

> the worst outcome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniracers#Lawsuit

Or 007 GoldenEye where Microsoft for some reason bought the rights only to throw them into a paper shredder

GoldenEye was re-released for Xbox One and is available to purchase right now: https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/store/goldeneye-007/9n6639h...

Oh, finally

And TV shows too. If they don't have the soundtrack-free version available, they have to do surgery to remove the music in postproduction somehow, or just not re-release at all.

That might actually be a better outcome though as then those interested in those games will be funneled towards authentic pirate preservations whereas if there is a butchered re-release then some buyers will not even be aware that they are not getting the real deal.

In the end the situation around sound track licensing in different media seems so counter productive to even the interests of the rights holders. Essentially shows and games that incorporate songs are free advertisements for those songs and in no way compete with direct sales / streaming of that music on its own.

> Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music

Even slightly more modern shows I think have had that happen as well. The Drew Carry show would have been a great example.

Yup. Daria is one of the most tragic ones, given how it was an MTV show and thus featured music iconic to the era and familiar to the audience. Replaced with muzak in the DVD releases, and a bunch of pirates have cobbled together best-effort mash-ups based on audio from TV rips, which sometimes were of very low quality, but for some episodes, all that had survived in the piracy scene was like, a RealVideo file with a 64kbps audio stream.

Can someone give me more examples? I didn't realize this was a thing and am kind of facinated.

Scrubs was another one with pretty obvious music changes, because some were part of the dialogue or a joke that just doesn't make sense after the change.

WKRP in Cincinnati

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WKRP_in_Cincinnati#Music_licen...

Interview With the Vampire theatrically ends with the rolling stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” playing over the final scene and end credits. When the movie was on Netflix, that was cut from the soundtrack and replaced with an acoustic cover of the song.

Daria is another example - being on MTV they used a lot of popular music from the time which clearly did not cost them much extra at the time of TV broadcast but was replaced with generic music for the DVD release.

Some anime on Netflix is affected. Off the top of my head, the iconic first ending theme for Naoki Urusawa's Monster had its haunting vocals removed leaving only the backing track, and Neon Genesis Evangelion had its similarly iconic ending theme covers of Fly Me to the Moon sung by its voice actresses removed.

Malcom in the middle ran into this, it didn't have DVDs for years.

And I'm pretty sure the ones that got released were based on pirates when they were released.

The episode of The Simpsons where Lisa gets a pony. Homer falls asleep at the wheel to a different lullaby than what was originally broadcast.

The substitute is a subpar filler compared to the original.

Dawson's Creek had iconic music, but as far as I can tell, the series with the original music is unobtainium. Afaict the pirates can't even get it.

I loved the show Tour of Duty on CBS from 1987-90 about the Vietnam War. It used a lot of 1960's music including the Rolling Stones Paint It Black as the opening theme.

When it was released on DVD all the music was replaced with generic stuff. Then it was released on DVD in the UK with all the original music. The music licensing laws and prices are very different. It's region 2 and PAL but plays fine on a computer.

I also really enjoyed this show and rewatched it a few years ago on DVD. But I certainly noticed the main title music was different. I don't recall noticing in-episode music though, and wouldn't have remembered it from the show.

I went looking for the PAL DVDs after seeing your comment, and found one season but not a full set. After looking a little online it seems like the PAL release might have been cropped down a bit from the NTSC release? If that's the case it seems pretty disappointing.

Yeah, I'm in agreement with the blog post in that I don't advocate for dismantling of copyright, but there are absurdities within the system like this that are in dire need of attention.

Honestly I think it's fine. If corps are going to make poor decisions with their IP, oh well, their choice and their loss. There's plenty to go around.

For corps, yes, but destroying history seems a bit far

It's not their IP though, the rest of us have only granted them a temporary monopoly and its in our interest that we still have the original works after that time.

Shortening of copyright would fix many of these issues. Games and movies make almost all of their lifetime earnings in the first few years, and the dribble that's left afterwards is less important than preservation and public access.

It's very hard to justify copyright in 2026 over music used in a 1980s TV show. Shows were aired once or twice (summer reruns), with additional syndication runs for particularly popular shows, and that was it. Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later. Copyright has grown absurdly out of proportion of the economic reality for which these works were originally produced.

> Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later.

Probably? But to devil's advocate here, I grew up watching reruns in 1990 from the 1950s on Nick at Nite or UHF stations. You could make a case that not only the actors but bands who allowed music to be used would deserve residuals, and with reruns that worked fine. The format change from TV to DVD and then to Streaming is what blew it all up.

Home video releases of whole series weren't envisioned until basically the 2000s. Most TV shows that did have releases on video would just pick a couple good episodes at a time, and sell those. A reasonable job to track down a half-dozen rights holders, and if you couldn't find them or get the rights, I assume they'd just pick a different episode.

The way the original terms were negotiated, the rights were just licensed specifically "for television" because that seemed like all that was needed, and the amount of work to locate each rightsholder to renegotiate is just astronomical. Thankfully now every show is making sure to get rights for streaming (and physical media... Right? Right?) but it's a shame what happened to everything from the 1970s-1990s. Only piracy can save us.

In the UK Red Dwarf had full series on VHS from 1991, albeit a messy release and taking some years to catch up with what was currently airing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dwarf#Home_video_releases

Video games sign terrible licenses even for their most core parts. Many of the millions selling Forza games disappeared from the digital stores because they couldn't use the cars anymore.[0] It's almost unbelievable since cars and their makers are actually getting a big marketing push from those games, but studios cannot get better conditions.

[0] https://kotaku.com/forza-horizon-4-delisted-xbox-licensing-1...

Yeah I bought GTA IV and still pirated it. As a bonus, don't have to launch that Steam shit every time I want to play it.