Keep Circulating the Tapes/Music

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Music

  • Whenever a musician learns that his or her work is reproduced or sampled without permission, the musician, or his record label, will probably sue the offending artist for copyright infringement. Often, the presiding judge would rule in the original artist's favor and issue a recall on any records containing the infringing work in question. The record would be reissued with the samples removed. This is the case with many hip hop or any other sample-based albums released after 1991 (works produced in the United States and released before the 1991 Grand Upright v. Warner lawsuit such as Paul's Boutique by the Beastie Boys remain in stores unscathed).
    • Another one that's incredibly hard to track down: the self-titled album by world music/electronic duo Deep Forest, which featured such tracks as "Hunting" and "Sweet Lullaby". The issue? They did get clearance for samples of a particular musicologist's recordings of indigenous music... but not for all the samples that they used.
  • The discography of The KLF (aka The JAMS) was intentionally pulled out of print by the band in the early 90s, who also burnt much of the money they made from them. The problem is not so much getting hold of the CDs (they sold many copies), it is the fact that their UK CDs were prone to bronzing, meaning that they could become unplayable after a number of years. Pressings from Europe, the US and Australia did not do this and so have become very sought after by UK fans. Vinyl is not prone to this problem, but being heavily played by DJs at the time means it is more likely to suffer from crackles. Luckily, their whole discography has been available illegally for quite some time.
  • The Grateful Dead encouraged their fans to bring in devices to record their concerts, this probably had something to do with the fact very little of their music ever made it on an album. Most of their concerts are availibe for free on the Internet Archive
    • Later other artists such as Phish, The Smashing Pumpkins, Death Cab for Cutie and, surprisingly enough, Metallica later followed the Dead's lead in allowing fans to record concerts, so long as the resultant recording was not sold for profit.
      • Dream Theater also being a strong example. Their drummer, Mike Portnoy, has been actively trading boots since his teens, and supports fans who trade/ULDL recordings of their live shows. He even started an official bootlegs catalogue to sell some of them, including ones from his personal collection. He was, however, not pleased when some demos were leaked in the late nineties.
    • After Jeff Buckley passed away, many of his concerts that were video taped and audio recorded started popping up on bootlegs. Some of them are easy to get a hold of (even some are available legally), while others are seen as "collectors" items.
  • Hip hop in general suffers from this problem, and not only because of the sampling disputes discussed above. A lot of artists have recordings and mixtapes that they either chose not to release, made very few copies of, or because they got screwed by the label, though the advent of legitimate releases over internet has helped alleviate this somewhat. For example, one would have needed to either download or bootleg albums such as Eminem's Infinite or KMD's Black Bastards.
  • Speaking of Eminem, much of his early work(read: pre-Slim Shady LP) exemplifies this trope. It is definitely possible to download a large number of tracks that feature a teenaged Eminem(and various members of D12, for that matter) from before 1995. All of these downloads, however, came from a very small number of surviving tapes and LPs that are very expensive to actually physically obtain. And if his view on Infinite is any indication, we are probably never going to see real releases of them - Your Mileage May Vary on whether or not that is a good thing.
  • Mitch Benn wrote "The Hardest Song in the World to Find" about this trope. The reasons for the song's scarcity include flexidiscs made from a rare kind of self-destructing plastic.
  • This happened to Metallica's latest album Death Magnetic, once fans discovered that the Guitar Hero DLC version actually sounded significantly better than the album version. Given that Metallica has publicly declared that they are not re-releasing it, off go the fans to Bit Torrent.
  • You won't find Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory EP in a store. Except for maybe a limited amount in their fan club's online store. They number so few, however, that they sell out again within a week of release and it again returns to unobtainable status. Even worse is the Xero demo tape. The same applies to a lesser extent to LP's other ten fan club releases (of varying quality ).
  • Captain Beefheart's Lick My Decals Off Baby, despite its critical acclaim, remains out of print due to rights issues, with copies, both official and unofficial, fetching high prices.
    • It's recently been rereleased on vinyl for the true collectors / audiophiles among us - still not much of a consolation for those who just want a simple CD copy, as the only CD release of the album is from '89 and long out of print, regularly fetching prices of over a hundred dollars.
  • Neil Young's first "Ditch Trilogy" album, Time Fades Away, was released on vinyl and is the only Neil Young album that hasn't been reprinted anywhere, due to poor mixing and Neil Young's dislike for the album. His second "Ditch" album On The Beach was also out of print for a while, but that was rereleased three decades later.
  • The Beastie Boys' first single was a song called "Rock Hard" that was based on an obvious ACDC sample repeated throughout the song. AC/DC denied the Beasties permission to include the song on their greatest-hits CD and as a result, the song, which was one of the greatest Beastie Boys songs, can only be attainable through original copies or bootlegs.
  • Mr. Bungle, on stage, performed energetic, mostly cheesy, covers of several songs. The covers included pop ballads such as "Nothing Compares 2U," punk rock standards, the Super Mario Bros. theme, 80s pop tunes, and, in the midst of their feud with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a mean-spirited mock-medley of RHCP hits. The Mr. Bungle covers have been bootlegged and highly downloaded through programs such as Napster back in the day.
  • Bootleg-swapping was once a vital part of community building in the ABBA fandom, largely because of the sizeable amount of material that remains unreleased. Most of it is from the post-Visitors sessions, like the Chess demos and "Just Like That" (which has gathered hype like a rolling snowball due to its unreleased status). This declined sharply after Universal Music sued ABBAMAIL — the biggest ABBA fan site/organization — for selling unreleased material as a fundraising measure. This fatally crippled the group and its founders, leading to the site's demise a short time later. Yeah, that'll learn 'em.
  • Rock and Rule, Joe Versus the Volcano, and The Apple have soundtracks that are only available via bootleg nowadays.
  • Most of Evanescence's "first" album (actually a demo tape) is nearly impossible to get hold of, driving die-hard fans crazy as they try to get hold of such rareties as "Even In Death". Copies DO exist, but even those are hard to find.
  • Atypical example: Smash Mouth's obscure album The East Bay Sessions consists entirely of demos, most of which were never released on their commercial albums. The East Bay Sessions was never an official release and is now out of print and difficult to find even on torrent sites. Fortunately, used copies are still available over at Amazon.com.
  • BT's first two albums, Ima and ESCM, and the singles from them, as well as his greatest hits compilation 10 Years in the Life, have yet to be rereleased digitally (or at all), due to legal conflicts between record companies or something like that.
    • The Coolaid mix of "Quark" was originally only released on the DJ-only vinyl promo, and wasn't publically released until 10 Years in the Life in 2002, and even then only as part of the nonstop-mixed second CD. That's better than the other remixes, which were never commercially released at all.
  • Dune's single "Heaven" was never officially released due to a lawsuit over Plagiarism of A7's "Piece of Heaven". It was leaked onto P2P networks, though.
  • Chicane's Easy To Assemble album never got a commercial release due to it being leaked and distributed on filesharing networks beforehand. Digital Piracy Is Evil.
  • Kraftwerk's nearly-forgotten first three albums were never rereleased on CD except as unauthorized bootlegs.
  • Jean Michel Jarre only produced one copy of his Music for Supermarkets album, then destroyed the master tapes. It was bootlegged via low-quality tapings of the mid-wave radio broadcast. Jarre actually encouraged the listeners to do that.
    • Bootlegging is also the only way to obtain recordings of his concerts in full length. Jarre in China is the sole exception, and it was released in full length because thousands of fans requested it by e-mail.
  • The Dixie Dregs were an acclaimed Southern Rock/Jazz Fusion outfit from Florida founded by legendary guitarist Steve Morse. They released six studio albums between 1977 and 1982, and then disbanded. While their first three albums have been re-released on CD by Capricorn Records, their other three, done with Arista Records, haven't seen print since the 80's.
  • The electronica label Platipus Records went out of business, thus all their digital releases have been delisted, eg Union Jack's Pylon Pigs album. Your only options now are to buy used or pirate.
  • Many of Gian-Carlo Menotti's operas, including Maria Golovin, Labyrinth, and Goya were shown on tv perhaps once, and never re-released. Labyrinth has yet to have any other recording, and all that exists of Maria Golovin is an LP record released by RCA Victor. Though there was a cd recording of Goya. Likewise, the original radio broadcast of The Old Maid and the Thief has yet to be re-released.
  • Bad Religion's second album Into The Unknown will most likely never make it to CD, although this is actually a deliberate case of Canon Discontinuity on the part of the band themselves (see its entry in Old Shame for details on why).
  • So far, only one of Xorcist's albums, Insects and Angels, has been digitally rereleased. Most of their discography used to be available for free legal download, but has since been deleted.
  • Peter Gabriel, in the early 1980s, recorded versions of Melt and Security with all of the songs sung in German. Some fans prefer the German albums over the widely-released English-language versions. The German albums, out of print and import-only, can fetch high prices on Amazon.
  • In the early 80's, prominent producer Fred Catero founded his own label, Catero Records, that specialized in excellent jazz artists and projects that were not as commercially viable as big-label artists. It didn't last long, and the majority of the label's releases were never heard from again (an exception being Cyrille Verdeaux's "Messenger of the Son"), including never getting CD releases.
  • The Desert Storm remix of Styx's "Show Me the Way" has never been released on any format, nor has it been heard on the radio since March, 1991.
    • There are countless "DJ-only" remixes that don't get released to the public.
    • The reason why this version hasn't been released is because Styx themselves hate it. The remix was done without their permission and they didn't like that the song was being used to state a political message. Eventually, they had the remix pulled from stations.
  • "Piledriver" by Amoebassassin (alias of Paul Oakenfold) was only released (unmixed) on vinyl, and the master tapes have been lost/destroyed, so no chance of a digital rereleased.
  • Like the above example, the full unmixed version of "Dude in the Moon" by Dastrix (a short version was featured in Need for Speed: High Stakes) was only released on vinyl, and the record label went under long ago. Same for many of Mike Koglin's other early projects, eg The Argonauts.
  • "No Goodbyes" (alternate version of "I Want it That Way" by the Backstreet Boys was never commerically released (although it was widely circulated via P2P).
  • Ditto for "Pure Intution", the English version of Shakira's "Las de las Intuicion".
  • "Promise Me" by Sandy Castillo & The Force, only released as a very limited promo back in 1992.
  • Underworld's Born Slippy EP, only released in 1996, which includes the seldom-heard "real Born Slippy" (as opposed to the more popular In Name Only "Born Slippy NUXX").
  • The original 1992 full-vocal version of The Nightcrawlers' "Push the Feeling On" has never been reissued, mainly because MK's dub remixes were much more popular. You can still find the single on Amazon for reasonable prices.
  • Two Steps From Hell, X-Ray Dog, Audiomachine, Epic Score, Immediate Music and other trailer music production companies do not make their music available to the general public. A lot of the general public are fans of this type of music. Do the math.
    • Ditto for Extreme Music, producers of "Sweet World", ie the Geico Robot Song; several other songs featured in In The Groove; quite a few songs from Ad Bumpers on Adult Swim; that whistling tune from the infamous Enzyte commercial...
    • Two Steps From Hell have caved a little and released 2 commercial albums containing some of their most popular work. Additionally, Thomas Bergersen, one of the two composers for the company, released a public album under his own name.
  • Disco Inferno released a series of 5 EPs in the early 90s that are popularly referred to (and bootlegged as) a set but are unlikely to see official release as such due to the EPs being released on several labels.
  • Wax Trip by DJ Inx/Dark House Project, and many other singles and albums published by the long-defunct Sm:)e Communications,such as Peter Vriends's Quadripart Project: Emotional Travelogue and Blue Amazon's The Javelin. Good luck finding a used copy of Wax Trip and ripping it (or a CD-R bootleg), as it was only released as a vinyl as far as I know.
  • Many of the songs from Shiny Toy Guns frontmen Jeremy Dawson and Chad Petree's Slyder project, famous due to the "Grand Theft Auto" Effect, are only legally available on vinyl.
  • When Slowdance Records, and independent record label, went under in 2008, so did most of its catalogue.
  • The Empirion songs "The Pain", "What You Are Now", and "Big Time", featured in Test Drive 6, appear to have been created exclusively for the game, and are unavailable elsewhere. At least you can rip them from the disc (I think), if you can find it.
  • Real Life's debut album Heartland which includes the original version of "Send Me an Angel", has never seen a CD reissue, except as a very limited run in their homeland of Australia. There's also the rare extended promo edition of "Send Me an Angel", which has an awesome piano break not heard in the short version.
  • The reissue of the Quad City DJs' Get On Up and Dance album unfortunately omitted the dance/techno remix of "Come On and Ride It (The Train)", possibly due to legal issues. Or maybe because "nobody listens to techno anymore".
  • Pantera's first four albums will probably never be reprinted ever again, for various reasons YMMV on whether or not that's a good thing, as some people consider those early releases to be guilty pleasures.
  • Eurobeat label Delta's Eurobeat Masters albums were delisted from iTunes and Junodownload due to legal conflicts with Avex Trax (the publishers of Super Eurobeat). They are still being circulated in CD form if you know where to look, although they may be a tad pricey. Or you can skirt the law and search for them on filesharing services.
    • They're still available for download on Amazon's MP3 service, however. Probably not for long though.
  • Music/Orbital's first three albums have still not been digitally rereleased AFAIK, and The Altogether is not on US iTunes for some reason. At least the Diversions remix EP is on there. Also hard to find are the original version of "Halcyon" (from the Radiccio EP) and the 28 minute version of "The Box" (on the rare single and a rather limited edition of In Sides).
    • No longer the case. There are a LOT of single tracks that remain very hard to find, however, and the bonus tracks from the vinyl and cassette editions of their first album have also never reappeared in any form.
  • All of the Art Of Noise's albums between 1985 and 1998 are astonishingly rare, as their record company went bust and all of the albums are deleted. Don't even get into the B-sides and single edits... a compilation has released about eleven songs out of three albums and their singles' B-sides, and it's the only commercial release there is.
  • Anything by the Industrial group Flowerpot Men (not to be confused with the 60's Britpop group). None of their records were released in CD format, and the record labels are long gone.
  • Patareni, one of the earliest Grindcore bands known, had a huge album discography, none of which ever really got widely reprinted. Several discography CD's were released in 2004, but they were also in low print and sell for a pricey penny whenever they pop up in online stores.
  • The Birthday Massacre's first release was two demo CD's. This was when they were Imagica. Less than 200 copies ever existed (and that's the number of both CD's put together) and they were handed out to fans at shows. The songs from these CD's can be found online if you know where to look, but good luck getting your hands on one of the CD's.
  • Amen's Join or Die (also known as Buy American on some releases), the album that Virgin Records refused to release, was later released by the band's own label, but only for about 2000 or so copies. None of the songs on the album have been released ever again (except a couple on a live album) and even the band themselves said that fans who didn't have it were better off getting it through "other means" than waiting for a reissue.
  • Ozzy Osbourne's The Ultimate Sin hasn't been reissued since 1995, due to legal issues with one of his songwriters over the album. It's not terribly difficult to find compared to some of the other examples, but finding a fresh copy may get a bit pricey.
  • Most small-label or independent artist albums, especially if the record label has gone bust.
    • For that matter, just about any artist, even major-label ones, whose work predated the digital age — mostly just the second- and third-tier artists, but still. Good luck finding, say, a Dave & Sugar album anywhere.
  • Almost all of The Beatles' music is available on CD, but although a couple of songs from their 1962 Decca session were included on the Anthology 1 set, others such as "Love of the Loved" are still only available on bootlegs.
    • After 1991, most of the American Capitol Beatles albums went out of print. The ones issued in 1963 & 1964 got reissued in a limited edition boxset, which is likely out of print by now. Because of lack of demand, the others weren't.
  • Xaman, the second LP by UK cult noise-rock group Skullflower, is a particularly Egregious example of this. Not only is the album almost certainly never going to be released due to clashes over mixing between principles Stefan Jaworzyn and Matthew Bower, but the CD version suffers from a defect known as "disc rot", rendering possibly all such copies unplayable by this date. This leaves only the original vinyl album in official circulation, but even this is fairly rare, expensive, and missing several songs. To add insult to injury, it is generally agreed among fans that Xaman is Skullflower's best album, not to mention one of their most accessible releases. Hence, the release only survives in full via file-sharing.
  • This can also occur if a single gets released but never put on an album due to Executive Meddling. For instance, Country Music singer Steve Holy released five singles between late 2002-late 2005, and none of those five appeared on albums. The first two, "I'm Not Breakin'" and "Rock-a-Bye Heart" (which also had a video), are not legally available online as they predate iTunes Store, but the other three ("Put Your Best Dress On", "Go Home" and "It's My Time (Waste It If I Want To)" are.
  • Lisa Lougheed's Evergreen Nights, which includes "Run With Us", the Theme Tune of The Raccoons (which itself is mostly only available through illegal methods), was only released in Canada on vinyl and cassette, and you can forget about a reissue in any form.
  • Good luck finding any of Freddy Wexler's music to buy/download, besides one freaking song. Some hardcore fans have put up YT videos of some songs (obviously not for download; if you're going to ask them, good luck getting a response), but the quality is...well, it's Youtube. There were songs on his Myspace, some on his Purevolume, and some that nobody seems to have heard of, save a lucky few. Plus, some of his songs that are on multiple sites are actually separate versions.
    • For example, "Dance" on his Kidd Kraddick-supported website (which is long dead) sounds completely different from his Myspace version...which is now missing.
    • For comparison: both Backseat Goodbye and Freddy Wexler have been around since 2004, made roughly the same amount of music (assumedly), both unsigned/indie, and Backseat Goodbye has over 100 songs on iTunes (and 50 on Purevolume, a lot of which can be downloaded for free) while Freddy has one on iTunes and four on Purevolume (none of which can be downloaded for free).
      • Not to mention that Wexler's gone by 4 different band names in 6 years (yes, ALL the same band), while BG has had its one band name, plus a side band or two.
  • Kill Hannah, anything before For Never and Ever. Obviously their songs (every last one of them) can be found on Youtube, but if you want to be able to listen to any on demand, that's trickier.
    • However, they also try to avert this, as every year Mat Devine hand-makes 100 copies of American Jetset, at the very least. Here are the Young Moderns, on the other hand...
    • And yet, with 50% of their music being difficult to find, fans still manage to know every goddamn song they'll play at a concert. Even "Welcome to Chicago", an obscure little promo single from 2000, and "Hummingbirds the Size of Bullets" from 1996.
  • Squeeze, an album by The Velvet Underground (In Name Only), has never been issued on CD and likely never will. The only way of attaining the album is through vinyl copies or bootlegs.
  • Both of Vincent de Moor's albums are out-of-print and unlikely to ever be reissued. Moor starts at $32 on Amazon.com,, while Orion City fetches at least $50.
  • Motiv 8's single "Continuum" was never released except as a DJ-only white label vinyl. Several attempts were made to license it for commercial release, but failed. Thus, the only way to obtain it is through methods of questionable legality. A similar fate befell "More than a Feeling", an even rarer promo-only single.
  • Pink Floyd's Masters of Rock went out of print before the transition to CD, and many of the songs on it are original singles that were only ever released individually, or on Masters of Rock. However, being a compilation, all songs from the album are available on other Pink Floyd releases. The reason its collectable and demands high prices from Pink Floyd completists is because it includes a rare radio edit of the song "It Would Be So Nice" and alternate mixes of the songs "Julia Dream" and "Apples and Oranges".
  • There was a trance remix of Vangelis' "Pulstar" by an artist calling himself Majestic 12 (perhaps an actual member of that secret society?) in 1999, that was never released to the public, although it was leaked and distributed by a few P2P users in the early 2000s. If you're not one of the lucky few who ran across it than, it's Lost Forever.
  • There was one album covering an interview between Paul McCartney and Rolling Stone magazine, released in 1980. It was recalled the day after it was issued for copyright reasons.
    • The Thrillington album, which is Paul under that pseudonym doing an orchestral vs. of the RAM album, has not been legally available since CDs.
  • The Concert for Kampuchea, released late 1979-early 1980, is out of print these days. It doesn't help that this is a charity concert album that failed in its cause. (Kampuchea was where Cambodia is.)
  • Run DMC's "It's Tricky" was briefly pulled from circulation in 2005 due to copyright infringement from sampling The Knack's "My Sharona". It was quickly back in print, however.
  • This is more or less the only way to obtain Autechre's Quaristice Versions, a bonus disc included with the ultra-rare limited edition of Quaristice', which sold out on pre-order. Even more inaccessible is the iTunes Japan-exclusive companion EP.
  • Adrian Legg's pre-Relativity records releases: Technopicker, Lost For Words, All Round Gigster, and Fretmelt
  • Leo Kottke's Circle 'Round the Sun and 12-String Blues. This may just be one album, or one is a live version of the other. In either case, it is/they are rare.
  • Donna Summer's 1981 album, I'm A Rainbow, was a deliberate effort to shed her 1970s disco diva image. However, her label, Geffen Records, was unhappy with the result, and the album in its entirety would not be released for another 15 years, despite the circulation of bootleg copies of the album. A small number of the tracks also appeared on film soundtracks during the 1980s. This would also be her last collaboration with famed composer-producer Giorgio Moroder.
  • Peter Schilling is known in the United States mostly for his single "Major Tom (Coming Home)," but good luck in finding copies of his albums Things To Come and Error in the System, both of which are loaded with spaced-out themes and weren't released on CD.
  • When Bob Dylan left Columbia Records in the early 70s for Asylum Records, Columbia released an album cleverly called Dylan of some of the less-usable outtakes (they range from listenable to unexceptional to downright awful). This move was partially motivated by profit and partially by revenge. A few years later, Dylan was back to Columbia and the album has largely been buried, never released on CD (though it apparently can now be purchased through iTunes).
  • Soundtracks in general; they're released usually a short time during and after the release of its corresponding work; and then disappear for good. If the medium isn't a game where you can extract sound files, hope that you can find the music on YouTube.
  • The Crystalline Effect's second EP was originally called Do Not Open. Pete gave several copies to some friends, and someone leaked their copy. As a result, half the songs on the EP were permanently scrapped and they had to pull some tracks off their second album, then called Hypothermia, and make new songs for Hypothermia. The result: Do Not Open was renamed Hypothermia, Hypothermia was renamed Identity, and there's about half an EP that only exists on the Internet.
  • The original 1982 master recording of Buckner & Garcia's Pac-Man Fever is owned by Sony, who has no plans to re-release it on CD. Thus, the version that's currently circulating is a re-recording that was made for K-Tel, those infamous purveyors of "re-recorded by the original artist" CDs.
  • Before they signed with Hopeless (and graduated from high school), All Time Low had two releases on a regional imprint: The Three Words to Remember in Dealing with the End, an EP; and The Party Scene, a full-length. Five of the songs on the latter were re-recorded on Put Up or Shut Up ("Break Out! Break Out!", "The Girl's a Straight-Up Hustler", "The Party Scene", "Running from Lions", and "Lullabies"), but the rest have been out of print for years and are almost never played live, so the only way to hear them is to track down an MP3 download somewhere. In fact, Alex apparently has the only known physical copy of the former, which suggests that he himself leaked it.
  • Much of Nujabes' music is out of print in the United States. If you intend to order a Nujabes album on Amazon, be willing to pay at least $50.
  • You kind of have to resort to this if you really want to hear The Flaming Lips' Zaireeka and don't have four cd players to play the four discs at once. While there are stereo remixes of "Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now)" and "Thirty-Five Thousand Feet of Despair" released as b-sides to the "Waiting For A Superman" single, the band have refused to put out a single disc version because it wouldn't sound right. There are still plans to release a DVD surround sound version of the album though. Until then, well, suffice it to say that there are fan-made stereo mixes of varying quality out there.
  • Most Shoegazing bands suffered this after the end of the fad. With the exception of My Bloody Valentine, Catherine Wheel, Ride and Slowdive, many of the bands' albums went out of print. This wouldn't be so bad if the Cult Classic status of the craze didn't raise new interest in this music. While some bands are relatively easy to find in used record stores (i.e. Lush, Kitchens of Distinction, The Boo Radleys), some other artists (i.e. Lilys, Moose, Majesty Crush) are damn near impossible to find without paying an arm and a leg. Sometimes even when the recording is available via audio cassette or CD, it's in terrible condition and isn't even worth paying so much for.
    • Even My Bloody Valentine themselves invoke this trope with their early discography and EPs.
    • Ride's self-released EP Coming Up for Air (consisting entirely of Improvisation) had only 1000 copies made.
    • Pale Saints are another heavily affected band by this trope. 4AD mismanaged the promotion for their albums, and they went out of print quickly. Their albums are hard enough to get a hold of and don't even get started with the availability of their EPs. The worst part is that these guys had a lot of skill and were often critically acclaimed.
  • Modest Mouse have several EPs from the mid to late 90s that are almost completely impossible to find. They're rarely available for download, had extremely limited print runs, and theories go that even Isaac Brock himself doesn't have the master tapes of said recordings (some of which were even recorded on an answering machine).
  • David Bowie's album Toy, which featured re-recorded versions of some very early singles, was never officially released due to copyright issues, but leaked online in 2011 and can only be obtained through file-sharing sites.
  • The New Zealand garage rock group She's Insane had their self-titled album on iTunes in 2006. There is hardly any way to find the CD anyway.
  • The Spinto Band had a long string of self-released albums before signing to Bar/None records in 2005 and becoming more well-known. At the time you could buy most of these releases from mp3.com, but now they're just floating around the internet. If you do seek the earlier albums out, be forewarned that Early Installment Weirdness abounds for the most part.
  • Garth Brooks' "Friends in Low Places" has a third verse that he often sang in concert (basically a more brash rewrite of the second verse). A recording from a concert at Reunion Arena in Dallas made it to VHS in 1992, and later got shipped as a 45. It wasn't until 1998 that most fans got the third verse on the Double Live discs, albeit in a version where the entire crowd sings said verse by themselves. To be fair, it says a lot when half a million people are singing a verse by heart that they've probably only ever heard from previous concerts.
  • Another country music example of a "DJ mix" was a combination of the Keith Whitley and Alison Krauss versions of "When You Say Nothing at All", made after Krauss' version was a hit in 1995. The unofficial remix was made at WMIL-FM and never commercially available, although stations across the country played it.
  • There was a trend in the mid-1990s of making "dance mixes" of country songs to capitalize on the line dance craze (translation: lengthening the song by adding a "breakdown" section in the middle and overall heavier beat). Many of these mixes were not widely released, although you might still hear them on radio now and then.
  • Also, some country artists today release acoustic versions of songs, which are often heard only on radio (or sometimes in the video). David Lee Murphy did both an acoustic mix and a dance mix of "Loco" in 2004; both were iTunes exclusives that are no longer available.
  • The radio version of "Tell Her" by country music band Lonestar, which was completely re-recorded from the original. Even their Greatest Hits Album has the album version, despite having the radio edit of "No News" and a radio-exclusive remix of "I'm Already There" with snippets of phone calls to and from soldiers.
  • Want to hear the original version of the Red House Painters cover of the classic Yes hit "Long Distance Runaround"? It's on the long out of print double vinyl of Ocean Beach. Though the song would later appear on Songs For Blue Guitar, many people who have heard the original claim it to be one of the best songs by the band. The later re-recording of it? Many consider it to not be one of Kozelek's best covers. The vinyl can be obtained, but it is extremely difficult, and extremely expensive, usually going for 350 to 700 dollars.
    • The music video for "Summer Dress" was also seldom seen before the days of YouTube, to the point where many doubted to it even existing. The version you can now see on YouTube, however, has subpar audio quality.
    • There are a lot of demo tapes of the band that contain one-shot songs that would never be recorded again. If you can find any of these tapes, consider yourself lucky. Many of them sell for cheap, the sellers often unaware of their true value.
  • Hank Williams III recorded a Country Metal album called This Ain't Country. His former label, Curb Records, didn't feel it was fit for release...until he left the label. Then they released it without his permission under the title Hillbilly Joker. Williams responded by telling his fans: "Don’t buy it, but get it some other way and burn the hell out of it and give it to everyone".
  • Space's lost third album, Love You More Than Football, and other tracks recorded around that period. Although fans got their hands on bootlegged discs, the album was never officially released.
  • Most early Filk Song tapes, such as those released by Off Centaur Productions in the 1980s, are unlikely to ever be issued again. Rights are again the problem, with many of the publishers, composers, or performers hard to locate. Further problems are from songs based on properties owned by third parties (Star Wars, Star Trek, etc). At the time the tapes flew under the radar, but the rights owners might cause problems with any attempted rerelease.
  • KMFDM's first album Opium suffered from this trope for almost two decades, as its initial release was limited to a run of 200 cassettes, and the master tapes were lost for a long time (and nearly destroyed by a house fire).
  • Most film scores on CD are like this, due to getting limited print runs on boutique labels such as Varese Sarabande and Intrada. One of the rarest soundtrack albums ever is Basil Poledouris's Cherry 2000, which tends to go as high as $1,000 in auctions. Poledouris himself didn't even have a copy, he gave his to John Waters (who loved the score and got Poledouris to score a pair of films for him).
  • Bodycount's "Cop Killer" became their best-known song due to massive controversy about it's lyrical content, but said controversy also forced them to pull their Self-Titled Album out of print and quickly re-release it with a replacement song (a remix of Ice-T's solo track "Freedom Of Speech", appropriately enough). At the time, they were giving out "Cop Killer" itself as a free standalone single, and a live version was later included on their 2005 album Live In LA, but the original studio recording has yet to be officially re-released.
  • There is one known copy of the album Around The World by Swedish bubblegum band Cosmo4 in existence, in the hands of a music blog owner who reviewed the album. Not even the members of the band have any idea how on Earth he got it, nor do they have copies of the tracks. The record label announced the album's release back in 2007, constantly delayed it until December 2009, and its supposed December 2009 release date came and went without another word. The songs "Peek-A-Boo", "What's Your Name", "Mexico", and "Adios Amigos" are fairly easy to acquire due to receiving official single releases. Other songs are harder to come by, but they're out there if you look hard enough - they're mostly available on Thai bootleg compilations. Two songs, however, "I Think We're Alone Now" and "What's Not To Like", remain non-existent.
  • Sinatra Jobim, the second collaboration between Frank Sinatra and Antonio Carlos Jobim, produced only a vinyl test pressing and 3,500 8-track tapes. When the collaboration fell apart, Warner Bros. issued a recall to retailers. At least five tapes escaped the recall and are still out there, but they're ridiculously expensive.
    • However, the complete track order of Sinatra Jobim was reproduced on 2010's Sinatra/Jobim: The Complete Reprise Recordings as tracks 11 through 20.
  • The track "Don't Worry" from The B 52s album Whammy! was a Shout-Out to a Yoko Ono track of the same name, and the group credited Ono in the liner notes. Ono didn't see it as such and threatened to sue; the B-52's changed it in subsequent pressings to a re-recording of a track from their first album. Only those who had the first pressings of Whammy! have the original song, and one such person put it up on YouTube.
  • Live Yardbirds: Featuring Jimmy Page was recorded by The Yardbirds in 1968, but the band didn't like it, and broke up soon after. Epic Records released it (with some strange crowd sound effect overdubs) in 1971 to capitalize on Jimmy Page's recent success with Led Zeppelin. Page successfully sought legal injunctions against the album, taking it out of print and making it the rarest Yardbirds album ever. It only saw one limited release on CD in 2000, which sold out almost immediately.
  • Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication is almost universally agreed to have been one of the worst casualties of the Loudness War; even the vinyl version did not escape its easily audible clipping issues. However, there is an "unmastered" version making the rounds on the internet that does not have the clipping issues; this is an example comparable to Death Magnetic, above, where the album can essentially only be truly appreciated through piracy. (It's probably not a coincidence that they were both Rick Rubin productions mastered by Vlado Meller).
  • Due to the fact that much of it consisted of extremely amateur, low-fidelity recordings, Insane Clown Posse has neglected to re-release a majority of their Inner City Posse catalog, save the more professional "Bassment Cuts" album and "Dog Beats" EP. One of the other albums ("Intelligence and Violence") only circulates in bootleg form, while others ("Enter The Ghetto Zone", the "Ghetto Territory" EP, and an alleged album called "Bass-Ment!" that even their autobiography fails to mention) have never emerged. Likewise, the two homemade singles recorded as the JJ Boyz, "Party At The Top Of The Hill" and a prototype "Southwest Song," may not even exist anymore.
  • Garbage have plenty of B-sides, and even considered a compilation of them. Unfortunadely, the masters are owned by two labels that were sold, and thus no one even knows where they are. Besides the singles themselves, the only choice to hear them is YouTube or bootleg compilations.
  • The first four albums by Da Yoopers were all released only on cassette, and were taken out of print in the early 2000s. While For Diehards Only and Diehards II compile most of the songs, these are missing many of the interstitial skits, and the songs from the band's debut album Yoopanese were re-recorded for the former.
  • Forty Licks, the most comprehensive Greatest Hits Album by The Rolling Stones, has been out of print since 2008 due to rights issues.
  • Hip-Hop collective OFWGKTA have an absolutely massive discography (one fan has counted over 500 songs), but new fans will have to resort to torrents to get over half of it - so many of their albums have been taken down from their original upload sites (anything uploaded on LimeLinx, for example), as well as many unofficial mixtapes and collections not having an official upload in the first place means the tapes must be circulated.
  • Mindless Self Indulgence has a lot of work out of print and no longer officially sold, especially things from their early days- the only way to acquire them is eBay or similar sites.
    • An example until recently was Tight, their first album. Many songs on it were unavailable anywhere else, but it had a short run- copies online sometimes sold for hundreds of dollars. The album was finally rereleased as Tighter in 2011.
  • Buckingham Nicks, the album Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks made in 1973 prior to joining Fleetwood Mac two years later, has never had a legit CD release and likely never will.

Music videos

  • While we're on the subject, how come you can buy all of The Beatles' music, but not the videos for songs like "Strawberry Fields Forever"?
    • Because Apple Corp., the corporation that manages The Beatles' copyrighted materials, is slow and inefficient and has strange priorities when it comes to group productions. For instance, before the 9/9/2009 remasters of the band's discography, most Beatles songs (the exceptions being the ones present on the 1 compilation) had not been properly remastered since 1987.
    • Let It Be is an especially annoying case. It was last legally released in 1991 (VHS and laserdisc). If it is released again, it will likely not be the same edit as was first aired in theaters. And, geniuses that Apple Corp. are, they released the remix tie-in to the film, Let It Be... Naked, teased us to think the film would be coming out shortly, but didn't actually release it! (it got available for some time on Netflix, though)
  • Michael Jackson's Short Film Ghosts (1997) is still MIA on any video format in Region 1. The Michael Jackson's Vision DVD box set includes only the condensed version used to promote its title song. MTV and especially VH1 showed this short fairly frequently over late 2001-02 (when Invincible was new), but not since then, perhaps due to myriad Unfortunate Implications which looked worse from early 2003 onwards and which Jackson's handlers certainly don't want people to be reminded of now. Simply put, it's an allegory for the first child molestation scandal...
  • If it wasn't for YouTube a lot of old school hip-hop videos (and old skool vids in general) would have been lost into the ether. Keep in mind there isn't a VH-1 Classics for urban music videos. There was BETJ but they only played a few token old skool vids, Same with "centric". Even then Hip Hop was persona non grata. But YouTube was a great source for old school urban music vids....Excluding the whole WMG thing of course.
  • One particular song from Rammstein's Live aus Berlin performance was censored out: Buck dich which was...rather controversial, to say the least. (Yes, this is the song where the keyboardist crawls around in bondage gear and the singer pretends to sodomize him.) Only early VHS releases of Live aus Berlin included Buck dich, later releases and the DVD skip right over that song, so the best bet to finding that song is scouring YouTube, if the copyright guardians haven't taken it down.
  • The Wings concert film Rockshow is considerably harder to find than Wings Over America, the live album for that tour.
  • Nine Inch Nails' release Closure was released on VHS, and a DVD version was planned, with extra content, but scrapped. So what did Trent do? He leaked it onto the internet himself. It is still available if you know where to look.
  • Skinny Puppy's "Worlock" video, due to its extreme Gorn content and laundry list of copyright violations, was completely banned from TV and commercial distribution, thus bootlegging is the only way to see it.
  • The full 15-minute version of Aphex Twin & Chris Cunningham's "Flex" video. Warning: NSFW.
  • My Vitriol released a documentary on a limited print to their fan club. Though 10 minutes of the documentary can be viewed on YouTube, the full form hasn't seen the light of day even on the internet. Physical copies are literally impossible to get a hold of, seeing as how nobody wants to put it up for sale (it's an excellently made documentary). It's a shame because judging from the YouTube clip it offered a full explanation as to why it's taken them so long to make a follow-up to their debut album.
    • The reason why only 10 minutes are available for viewing on YouTube is because the My Vitriol's record company threatened legal action if the band didn't pull the documentary out of circulation. The 10 minutes are all of the documentary that can be shown without facing said legal action.
  • CMT has done a good job archiving most country music artists' videos, but they are by no means complete. Some can be found only on YouTube, while the existence of others is known only through the video listings in back issues of Billboard.
    • A notorious video that will probably never be shown, not just on CMT, but VH-1 and MTV as well is "Top Of The World" by The Dixie Chicks. A number of factors contribute to this include the extremely depressing nature of the music video, the length of the music video (6 minutes compared the average 3 or 4), and the most of all, the controversy surrounding the band at the time. The video was removed from circulation on VH-1 after viewer complaints of the video's major Tear Jerker material, but someone uploaded it to YouTube in 2008.
    • When exactly the first country music video was produced has been disputed, with several sources making various claims. Country music historian Bill Malone has made the claim with Don Williams' 1973 single "The Shelter of Your Eyes," while Hee Haw producer Sam Louvillo has claimed the same for his show, with his videos airing four years earlier. In addition, Buck Owens (who later starred on Hee Haw) has said he was the first to produce a country video, for his 1969 hit "Tall Dark Stranger." And, a video of Glen Campbell's 1969 hit "Galveston" is known to exist. Except for "videos" aired in repeats of Hee Haw (the show currently reruns on RFD) the Owens' and Williams' videos have never been aired on TV, at least not since the late 1970s, while "Galveston" has been uploaded to YouTube.
    • The videos that aired on Hee Haw were not true music videos as they are known today, but rather were of cobbled-together footage of rural settings and/or sped-up stop-action films of people dancing and/or acting goofy, and were used more for comedy than serious promotion of the song it was played under. The concept was short-lived, as several prominent country artists expressed their discomfort with their songs becoming little more than an instrument for comedy.
  • The Screamers were one of the earliest punk groups to prominently use synthesizers, they got some notable press coverage and sold out shows in their native Los Angeles while they were together, and they have been cited as an influence by bands like The Dead Kennedys. They also never officially released any recordings in their six years of existence: They planned on making their first "album" a series of music videos (though this idea was decided on years before MTV was around), but broke up before this could be finished. Target Video officially released a dvd of a live performance from 1978, but otherwise one has to resort to bootlegged concerts or rehearsal tapes to hear them.
  • While most of David Bowie's music videos have been legitimately released on one format or another, among the missing are those he made as part of the Hard Rock group Tin Machine over 1989-91.
  • Until a few years ago, the concert film Urgh! A Music War, featuring performances by the likes of Oingo Boingo, The Police, and The Dead Kennedys was unavailable for purchase on any digital media, due to rights issues. Currently, there is an official DVD release, of sorts - Warner Archive has an online shop where it's selling an un-remastered, un-restored version as a download or burned-on-demand DVD-R, with the original trailer as the only extra.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Keep_Circulating_the_Tapes/Music?oldid=1637435"