Losing Isolated Scores on SEs (1 Viewer)

It was an isolated score on the main menu.

Jerry Goldsmith's Mummy score is under the Languages menu of the original DVD. If you just let it sit on that screen, the score plays in its entirety in full DD 5.1 audio. It's actually quite an incredible hidden feature (probably a mistake by Universal; it was announced but not listed or properly presented on the DVD). It runs about 90 minutes, and there is no way to fast forward through it or navigate it in any other way.

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The reason we don't get more isolated scores is simply because the studios fear losing revenue from soundtrack CDs.

But this thread isn't about that. It's about what isolated scores were on an earlier version of a DVD and then dropped for subsequent releases.

Besides, isolated scores continue to come out on DVD. Soundtrack.net lists more than 125. And CD revenue isn't the likely cuplrit: The Blade II DVD from New Line (part of Time Warner) includes an isolated score, but the soundtrack (score) CD was released by Varese Sarabande (part of Universal Music Group). New Line has no major financial interest in how that CD sells; it merely licensed the music to Varese.

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It's usually the same reason why Criterion DVDs go out of print: Studios have the rights to include an isolated score for only that specific release, or a certain period of time, and since music rights are expensive to maintain, they usually don't renew such rights for a later release. Also, there is a general fear of including isolated scores at all, due to the frequency that bootleg score albums are sourced from the isolated score tracks, and the composers themselves lose soundtrack revenues.

The record labels and unionized musicians whose contracts require re-use fees to be paid for score album releases certainly lose money because of bootlegs. Composers on the other hand, from what I've heard, typically get very little from CD album sales anyway and probably aren't losing as much as the other people involved with the music.

I've also heard an argument that a DVD isolated score could be viewed as a separate "phonorecord" release, requiring new usage fees be paid to the orchestra as if it was being released on CD. I do not know if this is a valid argument or not, but perhaps just the idea of it is enough for some studios to forget isolated scores. Of course, if all scores were recorded somewhere (e.g. Europe) without those pesky AFM folks, we'd be all set.

I don't know how difficult score recording music rights are to maintain. Rights for pop songs and other pieces of source music are perhaps difficult and/or expensive to keep up with, but score recordings and the score itself are usually owned by the studio. I have CDs that contain decades old score recordings that the studio apparently still owns the rights to, while the films that the scores accompany have apparently fallen into the public domain. I doubt that the studios went through any extra effort to protect the rights of these score recordings while letting the rights to the films expire. Instead, I assume that copyrights for music recordings persist longer than those for films.

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