Lack of Dragon Ball on Spotify

[Yuji]

Just wondering if it's a license issue considering a lot of other anime have a full soundtrack listed. I was assuming at least the insert songs or the OPs and EDs of the anime and videogames would be listed, but it seems only live versions and covers are.

[Soppa Saia People]

I don't have a full answer, but it's worth noting that a lot of the official releases of the original two anime OST's are on Spotify, but only on certain regions. This happens a fair amount with Spotify, I imagine it's mainly a rights issue with labels, but yeah, it's not fully unavailable.

Spoiler:

And these are definitely Kikuchi songs, the insert songs, openings and endings, and I think even some character songs. Using mobile free Spotify is a pain, so I can't really check around, but I'd certainly be interested to which releases these are.

[GhostEmperorX]

What's key to understand is that DB/Z's soundtrack situation is in large part a dumpster fire to begin with, in ways that most other anime soundtracks, even from before it, quite simply aren't.

Even those ones that have gotten topic channels and Spotify releases, namely the 2006 Z BGM collection and the 2003 Animex CD release of the first Dragon Ball Music Collection from 1986, are only from Y2K onwards. Same goes for that 13 CD complete song collection release. Nothing from the actual run time period of the series, not even the only movies to get proper soundtrack CD releases or the original Hit Song Collection albums.

Another thing to note is that unlike the one I linked and many others, there was pretty much no fanfare of any kind about those soundtracks coming to streaming.
(They also aren't crediting Kikuchi himself for any of the BGM, just listing it under "Dragon Ball". And one of the screenshots here shows that they're also not properly crediting individual artists. That's another red flag for these releases.)

Of course, it could also be a case of Nippon Columbia themselves being rather slow to adapt, considering how many other soundtracks under their label that they haven't uploaded (or credited in much detail). What they've been working on most recently is 20th Century Super Sentai soundtrack uploads onto streaming services, as far as old soundtrack content goes.
They themselves also have the likes of Saint Seiya and Sailor Moon under their label, but haven't done much with those.
(One non-Toei series that's theirs, Madou King Granzort from 1989, has its soundtrack on streaming, so perhaps there's some issues here & there with Toei IP's specifically. May look more into it.)

[Cold Skin]

It's pretty much the same on iTunes, there's this weird, selective come-and-go thing going on.

Those "complete song collections" with the artist named "Dragon Ball" were there, there were like 9 of them and I could see even more DBZ soundtracks coming up. I downloaded the few tracks I wanted here and there in time, but some time later, when checking if more had appeared, all of the soundtracks had disappeared from the store!

Now, only volumes 4 and 5 have reappeared since last December, as well as the same "Dragon Ball Music Collection" you guys showed up above with 14 tracks from the pre-Z series (put up on last Friday, December 29th). The strange thing is that the "complete song collections" don't count as the ones I bought before from the very same album, it lists a price for all tracks as if they were brand new albums and as if I owned none of the tracks.

I guess something went wrong with the rights and they had to take all soundtracks down. Maybe they were simply not allowed to put them on iTunes to begin with and now they're trying to slowly sneak them back up.
Or they are simply slowly clearing the rights (at least for some volumes), hence the fact that only volumes 4 and 5 are back up right now!

[GhostEmperorX]

And there you have it. Most likely conclusion, as usual, is that they have no idea what they're even doing over there.
(This while, ironically, a certain GW soundtrack is fully available on streaming despite the legal battles between the studio that made it and the ones who commissioned it.)
This department of DB truly never ceases to be chaotic, does it?

[Rafa Fast]

Just a theory, but I don't think any of these tracks/scores have been officially added to Spotify, at least I believe there's a good chance they weren't
Way back in 2021 on Youtube (eerily right after Kikuchi passed away), a shady artist started to upload Kikuchi's released music from Z TV series and Movies, including insert songs (from Z TV & Movies only as well), and claimed copyright for these music releases, these uploads were a complete mess, some track sets had the wrong titles or album/cd label, and a lot of the uploads had confusing credits, some of them mentioned Columbia, others don't, none of them mentioned Kikuchi or the artists behind the insert songs, instead a lot of them used to say that the artists were "AnimeFriends" or "FujiSys" (I doubt this one is related to fuji tv), info on both cannot be found
The uploads and their copyrights were taken down, only a small portion of the tracks were reuploaded (most specifically BGM Collection Volume 2), now these correctly mention Shunsuke Kikuchi as the actual artist, but that's pretty much it, but they say that the release date for that score was 2023, when in reality it's 2006
These tracks on Spotify were also uploaded in 2023, probably the ones behind the uploads on Youtube also uploaded those scores to Spotify, and I personally still believe it's not official, also, I said that this happened in 2021 but I meant that this was the most recent case, cases like this have been happening since the beginning of the last decade in reality. Watch out.

[GhostEmperorX]

Not to mention that a lot of the track names are in English, not even romanized.
It doesn't track with other JP streaming uploads I've seen here & there that had no translations for their title names. The phonographic copyright name (on Apple Music uploads) is also off compared to other Nippon Columbia properties, since it says "℗ NIPPON" instead of the standard "℗ Nippon Columbia Co., Ltd./NIPPONOPHONE" on their actual official uploads.

So your hypothesis actually has a fair bit of ground to stand on.

[CyanRonEX]

The releases on Spotify are so weird, One of the oddest things is that combine all the movie scores into one song.
Also this gem of a blunder

images upload free

[GhostEmperorX]

Also this gem of a blunder

Well, most of the releases themselves were blunders in more ways than one, so it's probably a case of "garbage in, garbage out".
And that particular track got 3 different suite releases, the first of which was 2.5 minutes rather than 1.5, meaning some track got mislabeled.
The tracks with that name from the 5 CD and the 3 CD release 12 years later were the same thing that went on for 5 minutes.

(Another thing about the first suite is that two tracks from it got incorporated into later misnomer tracks like "The Boy who came from the Future" or "Artificial Humans, to the City", which both got released in the aforementioned collections as is. Talk about a waste.)