Currently, all the master copies of the episodes from the original run are being held by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. They were donated by Tad Low, the creator of the show. Although master copies are known to exist, they are not publicly available due to licensing. […] With the sheer number of episodes produced, the fact that both runs of the show are no longer rerun on VH1 or MTV Classic, and the fact that the show did not receive many home media releases (apart from a 1999 80’s-themed VHS / DVD) due to licensing issues, episodes of the show are very hard to come by. The only way that episodes can be found is through home recordings of the show from when it aired.
I hated that show so much, those fucking pop-ups were like water droplet torture, each one that dropped slowly eroded away your sanity.
But I understand the sentiment. Licensing issues are such bullshit, and it is because of things like this that media “piracy” is a moral imperative. It is funny how copyright was originally to protect workers so that artists could actually make a living doing what they did, and how the laws were eventually appropriated and became just another means of rent seeking by massive corporations.
To be fair, I think most media fits the definition of lost media. Most things aren’t sold anymore, and often aren’t on streaming services. News broadcasts, music shows, talk shows, everything
At least it’s not actually lost. Just not easily available
I’ve heard that many things are not available “due to licensing issues” but I’ve never fully understood what that means and why those issues cannot be resolved.
Is some asshole just keeping it to herself? Does Trump use this to seduce video-loving women? Inquiring minds want to know!
When the program aired originally, VH1/Viacom would have bought time-limited, media-specific licenses (i.e. you can play my song on cable tv on this program for 5 years if you give me $x dollars flat fee.)
If they wanted to release the thing again on a different medium (say internet streaming, or DVD) they’d need to find who owns the rights (it could have changed if the rights were bought or whole companies were bought or whatever) then they need to pay them all more money, for a DVD they could offer like .25 cents per $15 DVD sale or whatever, but for streaming that’s a monthly subscription so the royalties all need to be re-evaluated (for ad-supported)
Anyway, paying lawyers/accountants to sort it all out is an expense in and of itself, (in the like 10s of thousands of dollars range) for like maybe 100s or 1000s of dollars in revenue, and it just doesn’t pencil out.
In simple terms, if they sold the dvds right now, they’d get sued by Metallica, Billy Joel, etc. for distribution of their music without a contract. It’s not worth the lawyer time to track down all the rights holders and make agreements if they only think they can sell 5,000 dvds.
The music is licensed by the record company. If a distributor wanted to release all the episodes on an official home media (streaming, blue ray, etc), they would need to pay for the rights of the music. Each. Song. And they are all hits so that’s big money. The cost to license this music would outweigh any benefit of release the home media. Hence the issue, no one wants to go through that headache. It won’t be resolved until the songs enter the public domain (70 years minimum).
Music has caused a ton of licensing issues over the years. They’d license the music for airing on television, but not for sale. Or the licenses might have been format-specific.
Some shows actually have to do a second post-production phase for streaming so they can change the music. The first half of Scrubs has different music on the DVDs than they do on streaming because the licensing for the songs was specific to broadcast and DVD.
That really sucks. It was so much fun. I remember in the Pop-Up Video for Til Tuesday’s Voices Carry, they kept adding facts that rhymed with the title of the song.
Same with complete episodes of Beavis and Butt-Head.
Them making fun of music videos was so much fun. And now those are dead and buried because labels are worried they might not make literally all the money.
