Columbia Records managed to mess up a number of live albums while uploading them for digital distribution by leaving out the transitions between the individual tracks.
In each instance I've come across this problem (mainly various Bob Dylan albums so far), it turned out that on the actual CDs, the affected portion had been mastered as part of the pre-gap (i.e. the bit where a hardware CD player will show a negative timecode counting back up to 00:00), so as silly as it sounds, it almost feels like they themselves simply ripped the CDs in order to upload them for digital downloads and streaming, and somehow managed to mess up the process and discard the pre-gap bits.
Though unlike your example at least in that case the CDs are still in print, so for now you're not completely stuck there…
why do you feel that sounds silly, as it sounds exactly like what I would expect them to have done. it was probably some intern tasked with the job as well. it's not like they were going to go back to some mastering format to have the streaming files created for the entirety of the back catalog.
In each instance I've come across this problem (mainly various Bob Dylan albums so far), it turned out that on the actual CDs, the affected portion had been mastered as part of the pre-gap (i.e. the bit where a hardware CD player will show a negative timecode counting back up to 00:00), so as silly as it sounds, it almost feels like they themselves simply ripped the CDs in order to upload them for digital downloads and streaming, and somehow managed to mess up the process and discard the pre-gap bits.
Though unlike your example at least in that case the CDs are still in print, so for now you're not completely stuck there…