Chiptune Commercial Rip-Off's striking !

You think that's Eat Rabbit in the photo yeah ? Wrong, the latest in the chipwires is about this norwegian band that apparently has been recording thrashy punk voices over chiptune tracks from micromusic artists and calling it their own productions and actually they also copied the costume from Eat Rabbit.. and that is shameless.

They have played festivals, releasing music and videos and now that the scandal is up they have been removing all the songs from their sites and blaming the productions on some other guy that seems to be invented. The authors of the original songs have created a page about this here, where you can hear for yourself the mp3s of the original songs and the stolen ones.

Ok, they have stolen music, but essentially they are a teeny trashy band (and from norway), they're not supposed to get famous with this, and I kind of expect this attitude at this level somehow, and thinking better, this is what hiphop is all about in terms of sampling, you don't really credit the samples used in your productions unless you want to pay for the sampling clearance, this is why producers find/chop samples that noone will ever recognize, and if you really want to be amazed, high caliber hiphop producers are also sampling from the chiptune scene, in one of the latest productions of Timbaland, the last album from Nelly Furtado "Loose", there is a song called ‘Do It’ that is completely based on the track Acid Jazzed Evening by Tempest, really amazing discovery, there is torrent file circulating with a very cool mp3 comparison of the two tracks...

And to continue the stealing vibe of this story, yeah, I'm going to rip some bits off Goto80's blog, why not, he's got some good bits in it :) Hi Anders !

An older “rip-off” is the MTV-hit You’ve Got My Love where Bastian sampled the drums off Jeroen Tel and Reyn Ouwehand’s old C-64 song Rubicon. In the end, Bastian had to pay for it though. They even show C64 Tshirts in the video, giving out clues is not wise!



other cases of ripping

Bodenständig 2000 got ripped off by the commercial mobile phone terrorists Jamba a couple of years ago. I forgot about the details though…

Zombie Nation’s ‘Kernkraft 400′ covered David Whittaker’s Lazy Jones (subtrack21) but according to NME Whittaker did actually receive money for it.

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