More Q-song copying?
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In a comment on yesterday's "Q song?" post, AntC wrote:
Investigating Feelgood's (alleged) oeuvre further, other than the vacuous stuff, there seem to a diverse range of 'soundscapes' from 'grunge' to 'house' to (almost) lullabies to vaudeville. All of them very derivative. I greatly doubt they were the fruit of one mind; I suspect they're all just ripped off. Many on Silver Cloud 5 have Q-aligned titles.
So I thought I'd spend a couple of minutes checking it out — and so far, it appears that AntC is correct.
The lead song on Richard Feelgood's 2020 album Silver cloud 5 is Q Send me. Leaving out the initial "Storm is Coming" thunderclaps, it appears to be essentially identical to iFunk's 2009 song Firedancer. Here are stereo waveforms of two 6-second snips — except for a gain difference, which could easily be corrected, they're millisecond-by-millisecond identical:
And here's an audio file combining aligned versions of the first 34 seconds as stereo tracks:
Feelgood's Q Send Me is entirely instrumental, while the version of iFunk's Firedancer that I found on YouTube (also on SoundCloud) has some vocal sections. So there's more to the story — but there's also no question about the fact that opening section of Q Send Me (also repeated later in the track) is an exact audio copy of the opening of Firedancer.
I'll leave it to IPR lawyers to tell us about the legal status of this kind of copying, and to political analysts to tell us what it means that Q's new theme songs are apparently renamed copies of older tracks by musicians who presumably were not informed or consulted.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 20, 2022 @ 11:07 am
I guess the followup research (which is not myl's obligation to pursue, but could by done by anyone else with interest and time) is to see whether the same apparent exact copying of prior recordings attributed to other recording artists occurs on earlier R. Feelgood albums like Silver Cloud 3 or Silver Cloud 4 where the titles of the selections do not appear, at least to my perhaps naive and uninformed eye, to be Q-influenced. (I don't think I'm sufficiently adept with Q-subculture jargon to be confident that any of the titles on Silver Cloud 5 are definitely non-Q-related.) In other words, did he (bracketing issues of appropriate pronouns where a stage name is likely not a real name and may potentially stand for a collective rather than an individual) start engaging in this peculiar/dubious practice before apparently becoming interested in the Q-subculture worldview or did it happen simultaneously?
maidhc said,
September 21, 2022 @ 12:02 am
In the second example, it looks to me like the percussion is cranked up more in the IamQ version. That is the spikes that occur at the beginning of each beat waveform. For that and other reasons, I would guess, just by looking at the waveforms, that it is not the same music, but rather two different mixes of the same music.
If you did an A/B switching comparison with headphones, you could probably tell a difference, but for casual listening they are going to sound much the same.
I've spent a lot of time looking at Audacity waveforms, and there's a lot of information there. But two waveforms don't look that close unless they derive from the same source.
The big record companies constantly run algorithms looking for music posted to YouTube or other places without permission. I guess it probably calculates some kind of checksum over the waveform. But posters often change the pitch of the recording slightly to foil the algorithm. I know someone with perfect pitch who gets highly annoyed by this.
rpsms said,
September 21, 2022 @ 12:19 pm
Re: missing lyrics, I am thinking Karaoke tracks