I was listening to 1987 this morning and thought to myself, what happens to the recordings from the non Finalists shows or even the prelim recordings of the the Top 12? Are they archived anywhere? Same thing with videos, especially nowadays with the Thursday and Friday recordings? I believe they do maintain some of them and my theory is based on the Legacy Blu-ray they released a few years back they can pull from them if they need to. If you watch the 87 Garfield show, you can hear the soloist at the end... prior to that Blu-ray release, you never heard it on the audio or VHS versions. They had to have pulled that from the Prelims show I would think.
Take Crown 2015 - everyone swears their Finals show was flat, where are the videos from Thursday and Friday night? Were they blended into the Blu-ray release?
It will never happen, but going back to 1987, it would be nice to have the recordings or even videos from Friday night - I want to believe they are stored somewhere, but the reality is even if they are along with all the recent recordings and videos - they will never see the light of day.