It was strange that these labels only cared about high UK debut week peaks and not that of any other country.

I wonder what the Carly Rae Jepsen Tribute Team are up to these days.

 

(reading this OP back was fun, it's a little bizarre now to imagine a time where this was just an acceptable thing :lol:)

We almost had one of these as recent as 2019!

 

Before the official version from the show was released, Jonny Lovato’s cover of ‘Toss a Coin to Your Witcher’ made the low ends of the Spotify chart - but didn’t make the official one in the end.

Always found it the most bizarre thing ever and never made sense in my head

I guess some people were genuinely fooled

Think Icona Pop have the record with 5 fakes charting for their song

The Icona Pop ones were hilarious, literally a new fake version every single week. If there was only 1 it would have easily been the second fake top 10.

New Music Masters - I Don't Care I Love It spent 6 weeks in the chart (61-51-60-56-68-89), all of them AFTER the Icona Pop version had been released and while it was still in the Top 10!

Most people will definitely have just assumed they were the original versions. I've been round at friends or family member's houses where they've had music on and been subjected to fake versions of songs by Fragma, Prince, the Big Brother theme (!) and more. Often it's because the originals of the songs they want to play aren't up for streaming, but they have no idea it's not the original anyway.

 

Who made the money out of these, incidentally, do the royalties have to go to the original artists who obviously would have never approved their existence? Clearly some of them were selling 50,000 downloads if not more so were making a bit of money. I never understand how these things don't end up in a courtroom, there must be some sort of legal loophole that allows their existence?

The massive outlier in that list is the Lucy Spraggan song :lol: All the others were huge hits yet that one only charted 2 places above the fake!

 

Also the only 2011 fake that went top 40 wasn't THAT big of a hit so that's surprising.

^ yes, what was it about Wiz Khalifa - he also featured on the only song which had a fake version in the Top 20, and a #9 at that, was Payphone really the most anticipated release of the early 2010s? :lol:

I think that from a legal point of view those fake versions were fine

cos you can always make a cover, it's a sample you need permission

and I guess those had been released in some territories ie the US but not the UK

so it was not a total unreleased stolen track, just not released in the UK yet

Always found it the most bizarre thing ever and never made sense in my head

I guess some people were genuinely fooled

Think Icona Pop have the record with 5 fakes charting for their song

 

It depends. A lot of them weren't eligible to chart. I can't remember exactly specific songs anymore, but I'm sure there must have been more which could've got 5+ in the official top 200 had they not been ineligible. There were also other cases of songs which had 10+ versions in the iTunes top 1000.

 

Most people will definitely have just assumed they were the original versions. I've been round at friends or family member's houses where they've had music on and been subjected to fake versions of songs by Fragma, Prince, the Big Brother theme (!) and more. Often it's because the originals of the songs they want to play aren't up for streaming, but they have no idea it's not the original anyway.

 

Who made the money out of these, incidentally, do the royalties have to go to the original artists who obviously would have never approved their existence? Clearly some of them were selling 50,000 downloads if not more so were making a bit of money. I never understand how these things don't end up in a courtroom, there must be some sort of legal loophole that allows their existence?

 

Well it seems that in some cases there was some kind of action taken, because it happened quite often that some would get deleted. But normally another fake version would just zoom up the charts and replace it.

 

But also, at the end of the day, they are just covers. Didn't Glee Cast once cover a song that had never been released in the UK? In this case it was a song from decades ago not a song due to be released in a couple of weeks but nonetheless, I don't think someone's not allowed to cover a song just because it hasn't been released in a particular territory.

 

Another case I can think of which more people might consider legitimate is those Clubland compilation albums that used to be popular during these periods sometimes had covers of songs on them that hadn't been released here. Probably they couldn't get the rights to the original on their album so AATW hired some of their artists to make a cover/remix instead lol. But again it's obviously allowed.

 

Another case I know of was in communist Czechoslovakia, pop music from Western countries wasn't allowed, but the Government would have their pop stars cover all the big hit songs from the US, etc, and many of those were massive hits there with the public and even the singers themselves being lied to that they were original songs!

 

So basically if these cases were allowed, I don't see why these other covers weren't allowed.

 

And yes, I'm sure those people did make a living off them, and still do today. If you look into these "bands", they are mostly karaoke bands. They were constantly accused on here of only covering held back UK singles to get a few thousand downloads, but it wasn't true at all. They cover an absolute plethora of songs. Album tracks, songs months after release, songs which are almost unknown, etc. They were mostly running a karaoke company by the looks of things. A lot of the time you've been at a pub singing karaoke they were using one of these bands. A lot of the karaoke videos on YouTube are from them as well. Hence why so many times they had a vocal version and a karaoke version. I even found one of these "bands" on social media (I think YouTube) and they were accepting REQUESTS of what song people wanted them to cover/make karaoke for. I think Ameritz are one of the most famous ones. They make a good amount of money for sure I reckon. And they make lyric videos (and I assume DVDs) so people can sing along for karaoke.

Edited April 19, 20223 yr by Eric_Blob

when you do a cover, any cover, I think 50% goes to the original songwriter then the remaining 50% is profit for you

DJ Stay The Night :lol: :lol:

We almost had one of these as recent as 2019!

 

Before the official version from the show was released, Jonny Lovato’s cover of ‘Toss a Coin to Your Witcher’ made the low ends of the Spotify chart - but didn’t make the official one in the end.

 

Arguably The Longest Johns' version of 'Wellerman' was serving a similar purpose as well with it managing to crack the top 40 while the Nathan Evans recording wasn't available yet and then quickly vanishing afterwards, although The Longest Johns are of course a more legitimate band than most of these acts (and the song itself wasn't original to Nathan ofc).

Listening to the Precision Tunes cover of "Payphone" how on Earth did that manage to get into the top 10? it doesn't sound like the original, how people could be so stupid to buy that thinking it's the original is beyond me :lol:

 

 

It used be interesting to see how these songs progressed in the chart though, more often than not it was a sure-fire way of knowing which songs were likely to challenge for #1.

Arguably The Longest Johns' version of 'Wellerman' was serving a similar purpose as well with it managing to crack the top 40 while the Nathan Evans recording wasn't available yet and then quickly vanishing afterwards, although The Longest Johns are of course a more legitimate band than most of these acts (and the song itself wasn't original to Nathan ofc).

 

Was there a similar thing with Alexa Goddard's version of Turn My Swag On (ie. one or more of the other versions being unavailable)?

yes, well the full story with Turn My Swag On was the Keri Hilson version got covered on X Factor by Cher Lloyd for her audition but that wasn't on iTunes so instead a bootleg Keri & Soulja Boy mash-up ended up charting before it got deleted and then people went to the Alexa Goddard version when Cher re-did it in the lives.