Keep Circulating The Tapes / Music Rescued

• Akatsuki Records has rescued some of its event-exclusive CDs by putting their content on compilations. However, it's a temporary measure — once those go out of print, the tracks fall back into Keep Circulating the Tapes status.
• Fans of hardcore act All Else Failed might be surprised to know that they had an animated music video for their song "In Time" from their 2001 album "Archetype." It aired four times on MTV's 120 Minutes and was seemingly forgotten to time. Music archivist hate5six caught wind the existence of a music video and took to social media to see if he could get any leads on the video, and sure enough the mother of Steve from All Else Failed had a VHS recording and sent it to hate5six. It can be viewed here, along with some words from Pat Shannon from All Else Failed about how the music video came to be.
• Bad Religion's second album Into the Unknown will most likely never make it to CD, although this is actually a deliberate case of Bury Your Art on the part of the band themselves. That said, it has been reissued on vinyl... but is only available as part of the box set 30 Years of Bad Religion, which features records of all 15 studio albums the band had released up to 2010. That said, if you don't want to buy it, there's always YouTube.
• After decades of The Beatles' music videos being out of print, Apple Corps. is releasing a compilation of Beatles music videos remastered in HD.
• Before they founded Big & Rich, both Big Kenny and John Rich had recorded solo albums in 1999 that were never released: Live a Little from the former, and Underneath the Same Moon from the latter. After Big & Rich became popular in the mid-2000s, both solo albums were released from the vaults, while the single "Forever Loving You", can be found on Discogs store.
• The entire catalogue of Blackground Records, most notably Aaliyah, was out of print until 2021, when the label signed a distribution deal with EMPIRE. Before then, Barry Hankerson, her uncle and head of the record label, refused to release any music at all on the label after Timbaland's 2009 release of Shock Value II, stranding its artists and producers in Development Hell and forcing them to sue him to release them from their contracts (especially Jo Jo; it took her 10 years to be able to fully release a new album).
  • Prior to the re-releasing, JoJo re-recorded all her Blackground albums due to the aforementioned label troubles.
• Blue Amazon's long out-of-print 1997 album The Javelin was digitally rescued in 2020 as both the continuous mix from the CD and the unmixed tracks from the vinyl edition, the latter also including "Trip To Heaven"(originally available only on either the vinyl or the German Special Edition double CD) and the previously-unreleased extended version of "Paradise Regime". Most of their classic non-album singles (some formerly vinyl-only) have been digitized as well.
• David Bowie examples:
  • His much-bootlegged Oct. 20, 1972 show in Los Angeles, California was given an official release in 2008 as Live Santa Monica '72 after a grey market disc circulated in record shops for over a decade.
  • A 1976 concert that was recorded and broadcast on radio's The King Biscuit Flower Hour was another popular bootleg. Two tracks were officially released on the 1991 Rykodisc reissue of Station to Station, but it wasn't until 2010 that an EMI special edition of the album included the whole show (Live Nassau Coliseum '76), save for a chunk of the lengthy instrumental jam on "Panic in Detroit". However, the complete version of that was made available as a digital download bonus track.
  • At the Turn of the Millennium, region-free DVDs editing together material from the two VHS tapes covering two of the Sydney, Australia shows from 1987's Glass Spider tour could be found at even legitimate retailers. Virgin/EMI finally released an official version of this in 2007, and the special edition release even added 2 CDs of a concert from earlier in the tour. This CD would later be reissued by Parlophone Records as part of the Loving the Alien [1983-1988] Boxed Set in 2018 and individually in February 2019.
  • Toy, which featured re-recorded versions of some very early singles, was initially shelved in late 2001 due to a mix of logistical difficulties with its planned surprise release and hesitance from Virgin Records, who were in the middle of a financial downturn and saw the album as unprofitable. However, a draft of the album leaked online in 2011, being spread around through file-sharing sites and bootlegs. Ten years later, a completed version of Toy finally saw release, first as part of the Boxed Set Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001) before seeing an expanded three-CD release as Toy:Box at the start of 2022.
• For years, Garth Brooks' TV concert specials were either hard or impossible to find. "This Is Garth Brooks" (1992) and "Garth Live From Central Park" (1997) were released on VHS in 1992 & 1998 respectively, but both went out-of-print relatively quick, while "This Is Garth Brooks II" (1994) saw its planned VHS release canceled, and "Garth Brooks Ireland & Back" (1998) was long forgotten after its initial NBC airing (save for a rare CMT rerun in 2002). All four specials were finally released on DVD in a box set in 2006, albeit with several edits made to all of them (and "Ireland & Back" being retitled "Garth Brooks Live From Dublin")
• Country Music singer T. Graham Brown's debut single "Drowning in Memories" was never put onto an album for many years, and was thus extremely hard to find. However, in 2007, he reacquired the rights to all of his material for Capitol Records (1985-1991) and put every one of his singles for the label on the album Deja Vu All Over Again: The Best of T. Graham Brown — including "Drowning in Memories".
• For the longest time, a Jeff Buckley documentary titled Amazing Grace was completely unavailable to fans. The documentary had won numerous awards and was one of the most accurate documentaries about Buckley's life. Due to copyrights issues rumors of it being released on a DVD spiked up and then soon fizzled out. Then, in 2009, it was officially released on a special edition of Grace Around The World. However, these special editions are quickly running out, but thankfully, the documentary’s on YouTube.
• After Spotify took their songs down for an unknown reason circa 2016, Critical Zone seemingly went extinct. However, their albums returned to streaming services within the following two years (but they still have no physical release).
• The Dead Milkmen albums Soul Rotation and Not Richard, But Dick both were out of print for years - these were the only two albums the band themselves didn't own the rights to, and Hollywood Records let them fall out of print, presumably because they weren't among the label's higher selling acts. In 2013, Hollywood Records re-released the two albums as digital downloads on itunes and amazon.com. As far as physical copies go, your options are used copies on cd or cassette, which are pretty reasonably priced, or unopened "new" ones, which are decidedly less so.
• The album Dreamin' with Def Leppard might be the only "lullaby renditions" album that features people from the original band. The CD is out of print and extremely hard to find. The original digital release was only on the iTunes Store, and when it was taken down, the album itself was very hard to find for a few years. Finally, in 2022, it was re-released for streaming with its title changed to Rock the Cradle: A Lullaby Tribute to Def Leppard.
• Disco Inferno released a series of 5 EPs in the early 90s that are popularly referred to (and bootlegged as) a set, but for years seemed unlikely to see an official re-release due to them being released on different labels. This was finally rectified in 2011 when One Little Indian issued a lovingly-crafted compilation entitled The 5 EPs.
• In summer 2023, after decades of being out of print, girl group Divine's #1 single "Lately" made its streaming debut, thanks to a Dutch record label that owned the rights to the parent album Fairy Tales.
• For a long time, the legendary Tear Jerker of a music video for the Dixie Chicks' "Top Of the World" was next to impossible to find owing not only to its radio unfriendly length of 6 minutes, but also the controversy surrounding them at the time. However, in December of 2015, it was finally reuploaded to YouTube.
• The Dixie Dregs were an acclaimed Southern Rock and 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, hadn't seen print for a long time since the 1980s until 2015, when BGO in the UK reissued a 2 CD set of the Arista albums in one set.
• Drake's 2019 compilation "Care Package" is an album full of songs that either never had an official album release or were once too expensive to re-release due to sample rights. These include tracks like "Girls Love Beyonce" (uses a sample from Destiny's Child's "Say My Name"), "5 AM in Toronto", "I Get Lonely" (a B-side from an unreleased mixtape) and more. In the interim, unofficial versions floated around Youtube and second-hand sources.
• Bob Dylan once performed a rather...famous concert at the Royal Albert Hall in the UK. For many years, a near-perfect recording of that concert circulated in one form or another, until it was officially released as part of the "bootleg" series of CDs.
• Cult band The Enid's first two albums In the Region of the Summer Stars and Aerie Faerie Nonsense (1976-7) had to be be remixed and partly re-recorded in 1984 when the original record company wouldn't return the 2-track masters to the band. Because of this the original mixes were only available on vinyl until 2010 (and only given an official release because somebody had bootlegged the vinyl versions).
• Dionne Farris' "I Know" was a massive hit single in 1995 (#4 on Hot 100, #1 on Pop radio), but the song was never released on iTunes or any other digital download/streaming service until the final quarter of 2017 - and by extension, nor was the remainder of its parent album, Wild Seed — Wild Flower, making the whole tracklist nearly impossible to obtain up until that point. As an added bonus, much of the album's music videos were added to Vevo, including "I Know".
• The Flowerpot Men (not to be confused with the 60s pop group) were an Industrial act who recorded a few EPs and singles in the 80s. Despite one of their songs, "Beat City", being featured in the hit film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, their music was never released on CD format, and with their labels long defunct, it was nigh impossible to find anything of theirs online (except the aforementioned "Beat City"). Finally, in April 2023, Demon Music Group released a compilation album, 1984, curated by the band.
• The Foo Fighters celebrated their 25th anniversary with the Foo Files, a series of EPs that made many B-sides from the band's first five albums available at large, after years only on singles, album special editions, and limited run works.
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor's demo tape All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling is perhaps the holy grail of indie fans. The band hates it, so it will never be reissued. It was limited to 33 copies, so the chances of a copy surfacing are naturally highly unlikely (with even band member Efrim Menuck expressing disbelief that it didn't resurface). And while one song was posted to Reddit in 2013, the person about to rip and distribute the rest was driven off the site by rude users. The demo seemed destined to remain in limbo, but in February 2022 it was miraculously ripped and redistributed, courtesy of a /mu/ user who casually posted it at 3 AM; this was eventually followed by an official re-release through the band's Bandcamp.
• The debut album of Christian Rock recording artist Benny Hester; 1972's ''Benny", saw only a handful of copies survive a fire that broke out shortly before it was scheduled to be released that destroyed the masters; resulting in the few surviving copies selling for quite a few pretty pennies. However, in February 2016; Hester announced that album would be released in a digitally remastered form taken from Hester's own promotional copy
• Information Society's 1985 debut album Creatures of Influence was only issued on vinyl, and remained out of print for over two decades. In 2008, their label HAKATAK International remastered and re-released it in digital format, as well as on CD as part of the rarities compilation Apocryphon, which also includes the songs from the InSoc EP(though its physical CD edition was a one-and-done printing and is now only available second-hand). InSoc was also repressed on vinyl by Mannequin Records in 2014, with addition of the previously unreleased track "Charientism", but Creatures still has yet to see a vinyl reissue.
• EBM artist/band Interface put together a maxi single of "Mirror Mirror" from The Perfect World, featuring the non-album B-Side "Energy", in 2014, but his record label didn't release it for whatever reason. In 2018, the master tapes were rediscovered and it got a release on Bandcamp.
• Canadian indie pop artist JanaJana's sole album, Typical Girl, was originally self-released through her website, www.janajana.com, which has long since shut down. It was later re-released to mainstream digital platforms.
• Jean-Michel Jarre's pre-Oxygène works were once only available as rare first-edition singles and albums from times before he became famous. These have been selling for outrageous prices for decades now. Some of them became part of the Rarities bootleg LP series, but these are sought-after rarities themselves today. However, the Les Granges Brûlées soundtrack was remastered and re-released as a whole on CD in 2003, and the 2011 Greatest Hits Album Essentials & Rarities contains one CD with super-rare stuff like "La Cage", "Erosmachine", several Deserted Palace tracks, and even Jarre's very first recording, "Happiness Is A Sad Song".
• In 1977, Paul McCartney released the unusual album Thrillington under the pseudonym Percy "Thrills" Thrillington. It was an orchestral and jazz reworking of his entire 1972 Ram album, and it became a collector's item due to its unusualness and the relatively small printing of the LP release. It wasn't legally available in CD form until the 2012 Deluxe Edition Box Set of RAM album.
  • The following year, the Wings concert film Rockshow, which was considerably harder to find than Wings Over America, the live album for that tour, was officially remastered and re-released (alongside Wings Over America) on DVD and Blu-ray.
• Microdisney's B Sides "Harmony Time" and "Money for the Trams" finally appeared on CD in 2013, after 28 years being only available on vinyl and cassette (and rips). The master tapes were said to be lost, hence why they weren't on the 90s CD issues, which were rare and long out of print anyway. For the 2013 reissues, the technology had improved so that they were able to use very clean vinyl rips which they fixed up digitally.
• Anaïs Mitchell's first album, The Song They Sang When Rome Fell, is completely impossible to find outside of pirating it... until Darcy uploaded the CD rip on YouTube. It can be found here.
• Negativland's single U2, where both tracks were essentially Voice Clip Songs featuring Casey Kasem having obscene temper tantrums between takes of an episode of American Top 40 set to instrumental covers of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For". It was quickly pulled from record stores due to a lawsuit by Island Records (both for unlicensed samples and the fact that the cover misleadingly had "U2" in much bigger letters than the band name). It then continued to stay out-of-print due to Kasem himself, who understandably was embarrassed by his ranting. Averted in that the band themselves put both sides of the single up for free download on their website, and later started distributing a bootleg album containing 11 different versions of the song, which is surprisingly still available.
• Ori and the Blind Forest has a ton of music that didn't get released on its first OST, but most of it was eventually made available on the free Additional Soundtrack via Band Camp, including the much sought after "Swallow's Nest", "Thornfelt Swamp Ram Battle", "Misty Woods Cleared", "Lava Fields", and "Mount Horu Puzzle Rooms" tracks.
• A particularly extreme example is Panchiko's D>E>A>T>H>M>E>T>A>L EP (which is actually a low-fi indie rock record) - it, and the band itself, had no documentation or proof of existence anywhere on the internet, and whan a copy of it was uncovered in 2016, it suffered from severe disc rot that corrupted the audio quality. It took four years for anyone in the band to be tracked down, whereupon they released a clean, remastered version of the album, and added on another unknown EP (Kicking Cars) and even the original disc-rot affected songs as bonus tracks. The band even reunited afterwards, doing tours and releasing new material.
• Pink Floyd's cancelled non-album single "Scream Thy Last Scream"/"Vegetable Man" went unreleased for decades after being junked. They were among the last songs completed with Syd Barrett, who was already so far off the deep end at that time that the surviving members of the band chose to withhold them from release due to the songs being too voyeuristically illustrative of his mental state. The tracks would become popular bootlegs over the years before eventually seeing an official release on the 2016 Boxed Set The Early Years 1965—1972.
• After over two decades of being out of print, the original version of PM Dawn's #1 single "Set Adrift on Memory Bliss" returned to streaming services in March 2024. Likely because of the Spandau Ballet sample and ownership of the group's name.
• Power Glove's "Hunters", featured in both Hobo with a Shotgun and Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, was not commercially released until October 2019, when it appeared on their Throwback EP.
• In December 1987, Prince asked Warner (Bros.) Records, his label at the time, to scrap the release of The Black Album a week before its release date. However, by this time over 500k were pressed on vinyl & CD and preview copies had gone out. Most copies were destroyed, with the few remaining being the source for "the most bootlegged album of all time". In 1991, Warner planned a greatest hits package which would have included the album as a bonus disc. However, it was scrapped when Prince delivered Diamonds and Pearls to the company. Finally in 1994, during Prince's feud with the same label, the album was legitimately released; Prince was paid around $1 million for it. Ironically, it's now out of print.
• For a while, the streaming release of the Self-Titled Album of the Canadian rock band Prism had some of the tracks mislabelled and was missing the final song, "I Ain't Lookin' Anymore". In 2022, the full album was finally released for streaming. (The faulty release is labelled as "remastered"; the complete one isn't.)
• Musicdisk, the 2004 professional album by Purple Motion of the Future Crew demoscene group, has long since gone out of print, but the album can be found on digital however.
• For years, the vinyl editions of Red House Painters albums fetched extremely high prices even when in terrible condition. However, Beggars Records, the new owners of the 4AD Records back catalog, re-released all of the RHP albums from Down Colorful Hill through Ocean Beach. Songs for a Blue Guitar has been reprinted more times than can be counted on vinyl and it appears that Sub Pop has even reprinted Old Ramon. To make things even better, the 4AD-era vinyls were lovingly reconstructed with all the original artwork intact and with the same exact paper used for the original pressings. Fans were amazed. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for most of Sun Kil Moon's discography or Kozelek's solo work.
• The 1982 slow Eurodisco song "Starlight" by Dutch group Risqué was expensive to get, especially the extended versions, due to acclaim and demand. The rest of Risqué's songs can be cheap to acquire. In December 2018, "Starlight" was reissued on vinyl by Miss you.
• Forty Licks, the most comprehensive Greatest Hits Album by The Rolling Stones, had been out of print since 2008 due to rights issues. Though a more comprehensive one, GRRR! came out in 2012, and even included one of the four new songs from Forty Licks. In July 2023, to mark Mick Jagger's 80th birthday, Forty Licks got re-released on vinyl and streaming.
• For a while, The Smashing Pumpkins fans were surprised to hear that Siamese Dream actually had a lyric sheet. The lyrics were hand-written on a series of family photo-style pictures which comprised the insert artwork. The first pressing gave each song/picture its own page in a thick booklet, however this was changed to a small foldout which the pictures were scattered all over, rendering the lyrics almost entirely illegible and forcing the listener to go to this new-fangled Internet thingy to know what they were. It wasn't until 1999 that Virgin finally re-issued the album with its original booklet insert, readable lyrics and all.
• The original Sugababes lineup, then reformed under the Mutya Keisha Siobhan moniker, released their single "Flatline" in 2013, and then recorded four or five album-worth of material that got shelved for several reasons. Eventually, "Flatline" was also recalled from straming platfoms and YouTube, while the rest of their songs remained officially unreleased but were leaked in an event the fans called MKSmas. For years, the leaked files (plus original digital download of "Flatline") were the only way their songs could be listened to by fans (with the exception of an acoustic version of "No Regrets" still on YouTube). Then, after regaining the rights to the Sugababes name in 2019, in 2022 the girls re-released "Flatline" as a single, preceding the surprise-drop of 13 of these songs in the aptly named album, The Lost Tapes.
• A subversion of this occurred with an LP when it was later reissued on CD. System, a Yes / Emerson, Lake & Palmer soundalike band released Realm Time Tales as a very limited-issue LP in 1983. In 1988, when it was first pressed on CD, the band name had been changed to Vail (after the trio's keyboardist/composer Steve Vail) and the title was shortened to Time Tales, with the original name living on as System Records. The new-name album (CD and download) are available, but the original band name/title LP remains a collector's item.
• Transa's 2003 double album Chronology included most of their prior discography, but a number of singles and b-sides, such as "Interphase", "Enervate", "Carla's Theme", and "Astro Dawn", didn't make the cut. Chronology itself fell victim to this trope for 20 years, until its 2023 digital re-release on Bandcamp alongside the aforementioned non-album singles and more.
• Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo released a trilogy of CDs called the Alone series that compiled demos over the course of the band's career while they were signed to Geffen. While the first two albums were widely released by Geffen, the third installment was only included with the very rare and self-published Pinkerton Diaries book. Thankfully, Rivers would continue the Alone series on his website and would include demos originally from Alone III on future installments.
• Kristine W.'s 1994 debut album Perfect Beat was out of print until the late 2010's, when it was finally digitally reissued via Bandcamp, Amazon Music, et al.
• Freudiana and The Sicilian Defence the former has been released in 1990 while the latter has recorded on 1979, but not released until 2014 under the name of Eric Woolfson (but often credited to The Alan Parsons Project), has the former never seen any sort of official re-release, not even on streaming services while the latter is only as part of the Complete Albums Collection box set, as a bonus CD. Because of that and its experimental, atonal nature, it will probably never be released on streaming services, vinyl or even as a stand-alone release. Thankfully, music fans kept circulating the tapes, and the two albums are available on YouTube. It can be watched here and here.
• Neil Young's first "Ditch Trilogy" album, Time Fades Away, was released on vinyl and was for the longest time his only album that was never reprinted, due to poor mixing and Young's dislike for the album. His second "Ditch" album On the Beach was also out of print for a while, but that was re-released three decades later. He finally reissued Time Fades Away in the mid-2010s: First exclusively through his Pono music service, and then a full fledged vinyl reissue.
• Yuuhei Satellite:
  • They tend to make Compilation Re-releases of old singles and albums, and as of 2018, their albums have been released digitally.
  • Some of their limited singles have been rescued by a digital release and/or an appearance on an album that was digitally released.

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