The streaming version of Showtime’s Queer as Folk is airing on Netflix with most of the original music replaced. This is a show that aired during the DVD era, debuting in 2001. I can’t believe the music companies and QAF’s rights holders can’t come to a simple agreement for music rights. Music is very important in QAF and several scenes are unwatchable with the replacement music.
I really hope this stupidity doesn’t affect other shows from the DVD era, approximately 1998-2012
IANAL but it seems to me that even if the show’s producers negotiated rights to use the original music on DVDs, that doesn’t mean they had the right to use the original music when the program is streamed.
I guess I would have thought they would have written the contracts much tighter than the 70’s/80’s shows that had no idea they’d be released on DVD or shown via streaming .
DVDs existed all that time, but I don’t know when they started getting big enough that TV producers took them into account. The Matrix was the first really big selling movie DVD, and that came out September 1999. The first TV show released on DVD was the X-Files, and that came out in September 2000. So there are probably plenty of others from at least the first part of that period that are affected.
Remember that in the 1970s and 1980s people were using dial up connections. In 1984, I had a 300 baud modem. In case you can’t appreciate just how slow that was, I would connect to a text article and could read the words faster than they were scrolling on the screen. So no one had an inkling that people would be streaming movies in the future. Or even if they did, no one was writing the possibility into rights contracts.
As for DVDs, remember that this was the era of VHS tapes. These started as something you rented (for several dollars a day, as I remember). Only later were videotapes priced for “sell through” meaning people bought them to own. And I don’t think TV shows were released on videotape, at least not to the extent that they’ve been released on DVD and Bluray.
I think he means that after getting burned once when tapes first came up, then twice when DVD’s came along, that they’d be smart enough to include a clause allowing use on future viewing platforms.
I’ve never watched the particular show in question but there are a lot of shows where the “background music” is pretty integral to what’s going on in the plotline. Producers of shows shouldn’t have to go back to the performers every time peoples preferred mode of viewing changes.
Speculation, but I suspect that an open-ended clause permitting use of the music on whatever platforms may be available in the future is going to be a lot more expensive than one that’s limited to whatever is currently in use.
In the 70s and most of the 80s there was no internet the way we understand it today.
The concern is, as always, money. The producers will make more money with each format change, as well as the actors that got decent deals, so the music people think “why not us?” Especially since the times this issue comes up, people are always saying how integral the music is to the show.
They got me coming and going for the only show where this matters to me: Daria. I bought the DVDs, paid for streaming on Amazon before it became Prime, and I still mostly watch the bootlegs I bought off Ebay because - while the quality sucks - it has the original music and the bumpers created to show between eps during Daria marathons (re. another thread “Daria, pose nude for this portrait!” “Jane, that will just fuel those rumors about us.” “Okay, I’ll just paint it from memory.”)