Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Are Anime Soundtracks Missing Songs?
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KitKat1721
 Posts: 974 |
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I was just finishing up a re-watch of Wolf's Rain last night, and there were a few times during the run of the series when I had to pause, quickly go through both the official CDs to try and find specific tracks, only to find out they were unreleased. It makes sense, since many of them are slight variations, either instrumentally or vocally, on an existing track, but its not something I really noticed until recently.
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pajmo9
 Posts: 630 |
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I definitely have some anime soundtracks that are missing some songs. Two that come to mind are Code Geass and Darker then Black.
It's not just limited to anime soundtracks either. I remember downloading the Shadow Hearts 2 soundtrack years ago just to not be able to find a boss battle them that I wanted the most out of all the tracks. Thats probably the only reason I never bought a legal copy of it. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Huh, that makes sense that they might be excluded for time-related and rights-related reasons. I actually haven't paid much attention to anime soundtracks, but movie and game CD soundtracks have often had omitted songs themselves, so it's nothing unique to anime.
The mention of abrupt beginnings and endings also reminds me of some of the video game soundtracks I have: While beginnings are not ordinarily a problem, as most video game songs would have a situation where the song must start playing, most video game music is meant to loop endlessly, so sometimes these songs just suddenly end. |
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donhumberto
Posts: 822 |
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I remember being quite frustrated when I listened to Wolf's rain soundtrack too. There was a beautiful lullaby that played a major role in the story that, sadly, was not included in the OST 
Off the top of my head, I can think of 2 more examples of missing tracks that made me feel quite frustrated: Master Keaton (which had a beautiful instrumental track playing during many episodes but for some reason wasn't in the soundtrack) and Intrigue in the Bakumatsu, which had a wonderful insert song in one episode (I think it was episode 12) that I have never managed to track down (I don't even know who the singer is, which is quite sad). |
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invalidname
 Contributor Posts: 2480 Location: Grand Rapids, MI |
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For some reason, I didn't imagine that anime soundtracks were ever released on vinyl. Since I grew up in the 80s, and Japan was an early adopter of the compact disc, I guess I just imagined anime soundtracks had always been on CD. I used to buy a lot of full OSTs at anime cons -- I have the complete set of Galaxy Express 999 "File No." compilations for example -- but those vendors really dried up once Napster hit the scene. At AX last week, I think the only CDs I saw for sale in the entire Exhibition Hall were a handful of Yui Horie / Miss Monochrome discs at the Right Stuf booth. I buy a fair amount of stuff on iTunes, which is cheaper and more plentiful than importing CDs ever was, but it seems like I've mostly been getting OP/ED singles lately. Although when you can get a full album on iTunes, it's often dramatically cheaper. The Wake Up Girls' double album Wake Up Best 2 is $16 on iTunes US, but ¥5200 (about $50, plus shipping) on CD from amazon.jp [Research note: doing this search, I found that while song collections are still pricey on CD from Japan, the few genuine score OSTs I searched for were far cheaper than I expected, with double-CD sets for Planetarian and Schwarzesmarken only coming in at ¥2500, although they're still a lot cheaper on iTunes US at $16] |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2666 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Wow, I didn't know that some background music might not even make it into an anime OST. I have a few OSTs in my collection (both licensed & imported), & I didn't notice any missing songs in any of them, barring it purposefully being a specific collection of songs that was never meant to house the entire soundtrack. In fact, one OST that I own (Hareluya II BØY) had two releases in order to contain all of the music made for the show. I can understand why some songs might be missing, though, especially for the reasons Justin mentioned. If anything, one could always hope that OSTs for more recent shows that are missing tracks might get a second release to cover what was missing from the first release, ala my Hareluya OSTs.
Really, what annoys me is when an anime/movie/game/etc. never receives an official OST release in the first place. I've seen or played numerous productions that had some really sweet music, but there are no OSTs out there for them, so I can't simply enjoy those songs on their own, and most of them don't leave me with an opportunity to record them from where they're used in a clean manner. I'd say that stings more than an OST missing some tracks. |
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Schoolie
Posts: 23 |
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Yes, I remember back to Cartoon Network's commercials for Wolf's Rain (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWC3IK1YWt4) and loving the melancholy song they play at the start (with Quent's lines about the "Book of the Moon"), but sadly that song is not on either of the two soundtracks I have. (Still plenty of beautiful music - one of Yoko Kanno's best scores!) I've also noticed several neat songs played on the Blu-Ray/DVD menu screens that are missing from soundtracks. A recent one is Rage of Bahamut: Genesis and an older one is L/R: Licensed by Royalty. Or maybe I just missed them. Any others out there? |
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KH91
Posts: 6176 |
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I also have a similar situation (I guess). In the Japanese trailers of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions, there's a theme (Link is to one of the trailers. If you haven't seen the movie...) that has been used in 3 of its 6 trailers, which started with the Jump Festa 2016 trailer after a 1 1/2 year ago silence since the first trailer in July 2015. This theme was so amazing (and got me hyped like never before) that I thought it was going to be in the movie. (Note: Other themes that were used in the trailers ended up in the movie like Passionate Duelists). When I watched the movie, it never appeared, which left me disappointed to the highest degree. Then I listened to the soundtrack of the movie to see if it was included in that, but it wasn't, which not only left me disappointed, but left me filled with rage (I later found out that it was called #00 CONQUEST, but I have no official source on that.).
I started asking myself "Why wasn't it at least in the movie's soundtrack since it was used in the trailers?" I know it couldn't have been made from the English dub composer of the movie because that person didn't even start yet and was looking at the Japanese version for inspiration. Plus, the choir used in that theme sounds similar to another theme used in the movie so I'm confident that it was also made by Yoshihiro Ike. How do you leave out one of the best musical pieces in Yu-Gi-Oh! history in the movie and soundtrack? It's too good to be exclusive to the trailers. |
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leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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This happens a lot with trailers of all sorts of media and all over the world. Sonic games do this a lot, and in those cases, it's because it's licensed music from outside and they only purchased the rights to use the song in the trailer, nothing else, because the games are already at or near completion by the time they obtained permission. I'll bet that's what happened with the Yu-Gi-Oh! movie too: By the time they made the trailer, the movie is more or less set in stone. It is also possible that they couldn't figure out where to fit the song into the movie, game, or TV show. |
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scrwbll19
Posts: 87 |
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Part of the reason why iTunes is cheaper is because of the lower quality. A CD has a bitrate of 1411 kbps while mp3 has a max bitrate of 320 kbps. So, while you might be paying over 3 times the cost on Amazon.jp, you will be losing almost 4 times the sound quality. Just something to think about. 
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2666 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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This reminds me of two Super Robot Wars games that featured original songs for their promotion videos, neither of which ever saw clean releases. SRW D & W both featured completely original songs for their PVs, complete with lyrics & everything, and both were absolutely awesome songs. Unfortunately, the only way to listen to either of them now is by ripping the songs from the PVs, which are filled with sound effects from the game footage used. In fact, D's PV theme has never been identified with a name in the 14 years since the game's release. At the very least, W's PV theme has since been identified as "W no Theme ~Ikusen Kounen no Kanata he~", with vocals by H.T.EXISTENZ. Apparently H.T.EXISTENZ is a pseudonym for someone in Banpresto's staff, so "he" is likely also the singer for D's theme. Still, it's bizarre that Banpresto would commission its staff to produce two rather excellent promotional themes, yet never let them be heard without all of the various sound effects heard in the PVs themselves. In fact, fans have since tried their hardest to remove (or at least dull) the sound effects, but none of the results have come out sounding good at all. |
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WingKing
Posts: 617 |
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Escaflowne spawned three official soundtrack CDs for the TV series, with a combined running time for all three of about 165 minutes, and then later we got the Lovers Only CD that was a mix of popular tracks re-released from the first three CDs and also included several MORE tracks that hadn't been released on any of the first three CDs yet (including "Chain," which is one of my favorite pieces from the whole series). So yeah, 3+ CDs worth of music for a single 26-episode series. If that show had flopped, or just hadn't been popular enough to support releasing more than one soundtrack CD, that's almost two more hours' worth of music that would've stayed in the vault forever.
More recently I bought the Yuki Yuna OST when that came out, and I didn't really notice any major omissions from that one. There were definitely some tracks from the TV series that didn't make it onto the OST CD, but the ones I noticed were all from the show's comedy scenes, and probably would've felt out of place with the rest of the music selections. Sometimes less can be more, if leaving out a certain track makes the album as a whole a more cohesive listening experience, and I'm sure that was the thinking there. |
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writerpatrick
 Posts: 680 Location: Canada |
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This happens with western/Hollywood soundtracks as well. Sometimes there will be a song used in the movie that's left out of the soundtrack. Most of the time it's some incidental background piece like a common folk song or another well known song they only use a few seconds of. But I did run across this with the Out of Africa soundtrack. It only had the orchestral score and was missing The Music of Goodbye song, which was the main reason I bought the soundtrack in the first place.
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Shaterri
Posts: 173 |
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I'm not going to go down the audiophile rabbit hole (except to note that the comparison here is completely meaningless something something compression etc), but this seems pretty nonsensical to me unless you can point to a _specific_ correlation of quality with production cost. Yes, there are some 'audio purists' who will pay enough that occasionally high-quality releases make sense, but for this market I think there's basically zero demand for any fidelity bar of CD over purely-digital music. I'm pretty sure the difference here comes down to much more traditional physical factors: it costs money to physically make CDs, and it costs money to get CDs from point A to point B, and by and large those costs don't exist for MP3s. (There are also some reasons related to the old-school Japanese publishing strangleholds, but that's a much more complicated matter.) As far as the actual topic is concerned: I hit this with the Monogatari soundtracks. That show has been excellent about releasing its music in general (no surprise, considering the voice talent involved; there's a lot of money in it for them) but Nisemonogatari specifically only got a release bundled in with the show's DVDs rather than a separate CD release, so one of my favorite pieces of music from the series (Kaiki's gorgeous cello theme) is for all intents and purposes unavailable. |
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Cerceaux
 Posts: 180 Location: Earth |
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I haven't bought enough anime soundtracks to encounter this in that area, but for a while it was making me crazy that a piece of the score I really liked was conspicuously missing from the Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone soundtrack. Not only is it played several times in the film, it's also part of the BGM you hear in the theme parks.
Also the Cirque du Soleil soundtracks rarely contain the music heard in the actual shows, rather they have pieces "inspired by" the show or vastly different versions of the songs. |
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