I was so surprised and bummed when I discovered this was a thing. My wife and I started watching the original Beverly Hills 90210—a sort of ridiculous snapshot of American pop culture in the early 1990s—on some streaming service, and after a few episodes I noticed the music was just...super wrong.

Reading online, I learned that a lot of the original music had been licensed only for the original run of the show, so even when it went to DVD in the early 2000s they had to remove a whole bunch of the original music. It's terrible on two fronts: one, the show is an awesome snapshot of 90s music, with tons of great stuff featured both as background music and in extended live performances, but they cut whole scenes and entire episodes that had too much of it, and two, whoever managed the process of picking replacement music clearly did not care at all, and used awful generic music that sounds like it came from a file called "BeachRiff.aiff" on a $29.95 CD library of royalty-free 60 second stock music samples.

I admit to finding a source of video files patched together from various sources with the original soundtracks intact, and it's simply MUCH more enjoyable. It seems, though, that some episodes of live performances are lost to time—or at least lost to the corporate owners who'd rather sit on the tapes in a warehouse somewhere than make them available.

You can no longer get Rocky&Bullwinkle episodes with the original music. The replacement music is so awful it is unwatchable.

what's really pointless is how they released the beavis and butthead episodes without the music videos. even the replays on mtv or mtv2 back in the 2000s couldn't play the music videos.

Back in the 90s, people just had no concept of today's media offerings. Content was edited specifically to work with the only home media they new of at the time, and that was interlaced TV at frame rates of 29.97 or 25. There was no concept for progressive displays. The only home video format that was in wide use was VHS, and TV shows just didn't find their way there. That was something for theatrical releases. TV shows were much more concerned about trying to make it to syndication. When it came time to licensing, that's all the producers had on their radar.

What's the point? This was much less a malicious thing than it is made out to be. Once the licensing ran out, that's it. They can't just YOLO their way through it, or they'd have been sued. It's possible they tried to negotiate new terms for the music, but terms couldn't be agreed. When it came time to release on DVD, the person involved for the music might not have been available or interested in doing it again. At that point, the music would never feel right when replaced. The last point being these producers would be doing this on the cheap, so your <$30 CD library wouldn't have been far off, except the music libraries would have been much more expensive than that. Decent royalty free music has only been a thing within the past 10-15 years.

Edit: one more thing about the music, it is a large expense for the production. the studios are usually willing to pay for it to air, because they know how much ad sales they have and build it into part of the per episode expense. negotiating for DVD release with no known amount of money to earn makes it difficult to negotiate a license for "real" music

I hate that kind of destruction of what I think should ultimately be considered property of humanity. When you create something, you're free to destroy or ruin it. Once you share it with somebody else, you should need their consent to destroy it.