Nah

Some of doodle

Sissi and Rudolf

I’ve been thinking about making a post like this for a while but wondered hm do I want to be giving out links to free downloads of musical audios publicly when really I want to promote people still buying CDs because one, it supports the artists, and two, I think it’s better to own things still rather than just own things digitally. But I found an extra treasure trove I didn’t know about before and I feel a need to share because I didn’t make it, it’s already online, so why shouldn’t I tell people about it? And then this was just going to be for audios and not videos and I was going to make a separate post but figured it would be easier if all the info was on one post. I actually was going to post this on my sideblog @europeanmuscials but I accidentally made the draft under my main blog which meant I couldn’t change it later and I couldn’t be bothered to cope and paste and redo all the images and tags because I didn’t save the images I just copy and pasted them so oh well.

Purchasing

So as I always preface when I share info on where to stream musicals, PLEASE try always support the artists by buying CDs and DVDs! I know a lot of the musicals here are 10/20+ years old and you cannot get the CDs anywhere anymore, but when a new musical comes out please try and get the CD without instatnly looking for a download.  You can purchase non-English language musical CDs, DVDs and other merch from places like soundofmusic-shop.de or Ebay, or Yahoo Auctions for Japanese musicals, using a proxy shipping service, I personally use ZenMarket. Those are how I’ve gotten all of mine, getting them off Ebay or Yahoo Auctions means they’ll likely be second hand and there is nothing wrong or weird about buying second hand goods.

Streaming Audio

Spotify. A lot of German and French musicals are on Youtube. I have a series of playlists that will help you find them easily: one is my favourite songs from a bunch of different non-English language musicals, one of songs from solo albums from European and Asian musical theatre artists, and this one which is going to be the most help that is a huge playlist of every single full cast album of every non-English musical cast album I have found on Spotify. Please let me know if I’ve missed any on there and I’ll add them.

Youtube. Some official cast albums are also on Youtube, normally official uploads that match the Spotify uploads. Ones I know of that aren’t on Spotify for example is the original 2003 Dutch production of one of my favourite musicals 3 Musketiers and the 2005 German production of it.

Streaming Video

I want to preface this with how unlike Broadway and the West End, it’s fairly common for European musicals to get proshots and DVD and Bluray releases and so you don’t normally need to resort to looking for bootleg videos and can watch and purchase the pretty official proshots instead.

Youtube. There’s so many different channels uploading them to Youtube that for ease I made a playlist of every full length production on Youtube starting with the ones that have English subtitles. I also have playlists for different individual musicals and misc European musicals that are full of shorter videos: clips, interviews, behind the scenes, concert performances and other videos that aren’t full length production videos. These playlists are constantly updated.

Bilibili. A Chinese video sharing website. It has a lot Asian musicals of course, but European musicals, in particular French and German ones, have a very dedicated fanbase in Asia and so there are a lot of videos on here. You can search for then using the English/Roman alphabet and they normally come up fine. Easiest way I search on there is using the name of the musical/actor and a year.

VK. A Russian social media similar to Facebook. There are multiple fanpages for specific actors and musicals where I’ve found videos, but you can also search over all of VK. You might need an account to do this, I don’t remember but I think you do and that’s why I made one there. Here’s links to fanpages for Drew Sarich, Jan Ammann, Mark Seibert and Thomas Borchert.

Downloading Audio

r/castrecordings on Reddit. It’s a community of traders and you can make a reply to their request threads for the month asking if anyone has the audio you’re looking for, but please check first to see if it’s already been uploaded. I have downloaded many audios off there and I also have uploaded audios to there if I see someone request something that I have because I feel that it’s only fair for me to help others out there when I’ve downloaded things off there so many times. Be aware download links on here often get deleted and so a lot of older posts don’t have working download links anymore, but you can just request for a new working download on the request threads.

archive.org. Now I would never have thought of looking there, but I was on there because they have a lot of old silent films and so I was looking to watch the original Phantom of the Opera film and when I searched Phantom I was surprised by some cast albums that came up. So I wondered what would happen if I just looked at audios and oh I have found a wonderful little treasure trove. User musical_lover_1980 has uploaded over 1 thousand cast albums of Broadway, West End and non-English language musicals and a few film soundtracks. A lot of ones on there I’ve found before on r/castrecordings, but I was so happy to find a number that I didn’t already have. There’s even one Takarazuka album on there, which isn’t a lot but do you know how rare and hard those things are to find. And the Korean Frankenstein musical cast album!!

EDIT: also the account @ WennLi3b3 on archive.org is uploading audios and proshot videos 

Elisabeth das Musical, Original Vienna Production

Elisabeth’s dress during the ‘Wie Du’ reprise