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Nicking music easy for Timbaland and Nelly Furtado ?
I got a mail from a Side-Line reader referring me to something that kinda shocked me. Aparently the reknown producer Timbaland has ripped off another track to use it in the song "Do it" on the latest album "Loose" by the Canadian singer Nelly Furtado. Part of the track is clearly stolen from a c64 conversion of an Amiga mod made by the Finnish demoscener Janne "Tempest/Damage" Suni seeing and hearing the evidences given by the original composer.

The track was entered into a music-competition at Assembly 2000, a multimedia-party held in Helsinki, Finland in the year 2000. His entry "Acid Jazzed Evening" , a 4 channel Amiga .MOD won the competition. Still according to the info Janne Suni has never given up the copyright for his original track, and he never heard from neither Timbaland or any of the other producers, or Geffen.

Good to know, according to Scene.org the song got uploaded on their servers in 2000, way before the release of the "Do it" song by Furtado. And above you can see a video showing that both the track intro and melody apparently have been ripped from the original demo.

Judge for yourself !

For those of you that are not familiar with the demoscene, its basically an underground group of artists who produce video and music to be placed along with cracktros before pirated and shareware software.

Sorry to hear about the theft, but I'm loving these tunes. I might have to look into downloading more demoscene songs

Is not that accurate, and could be picked up by people with very little brainpower as a justification for the plagerism.

Name a type of music that has been more influential in the last 30 years..

Music from the Demoscene, apparently.

Hi mate, is it possible to get in contact with Tempest? Since Somethingawful is a pay-based forum, I can't get in contact with the author of the original thread. I only intern for interscope at tims myspace and such, but if I could get contact details and forward them onto Timbaland it could sort a lot out. However Timbaland is also on tour with JT, so he's very busy at this sort of time travelling, rehearsing and such.

Thanks a lot for any help

by tempestflt on 1/12/07
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I came here to clear up some things...

Seems like many of the people writing here didn't even bother to listen closely to 'Acidjazzed Evening' (referred as AE from now on) and 'Do It' (referred is DI from now on), or are just plain tonedeaf. Maybe it would help if I'd explain what
those songs have and don't have in common. Grab your headphones, because they really help spotting the stuff
in DI that got sampled!

First: the basis of the song DI is the intro from AE. If you want to spot the similarities, then don't listen AE longer than
15 seconds, which holds 16 bars of music (no, DI is not "quoting" AE - 1-2 seconds would be quoting).
There is not a single part in DI that is not based on these 16 bars. In the chorus of DI, the sampled part is cut into
half and only the first half of it is being used, played over and over till the next verse, when the whole sample is
being played again.

AE repeats it's intro-theme at some point, but mainly it goes to another directions. If you have hard time finding the
resemblance between AE and DI, then don't listen AE for more than 15 seconds. This is crucial.

What was sampled?
For DI someone sampled the intro of GRG's C64-version of AE, but with disabling the bass-channel. The bassline was
reconstructed in DI - no, It's not "totally different" than AE's bassline as someone said. It's just a stripped down version, with octave intervals removed (fe. A2-A3 -> A2) and 2-3 notes left out.
There are 6 different chords (of which many are repeated) in AE's intro, jazzy kind of chords that for most I dont even
know their names, but I'll list them here to show that it's not a typical pop-song chord-progression (actually if someone
can find a similar chord-progression, I'll give him a beer or two):
G# C C# F | A# C# F G# | G# C# D# F | F# A# C# F | A# C D# G# | G# C D# F
Each column represents a list of notes used in each chord. It's not the actual chord-progression, but a list of the
6 chords (most popsongs have around 3-4 chords all together) used in the intro, but I think you get the point...

The chords are arpeggiated, which means that the notes in the chord are being played at the same time, but being
rapidly from lowest note to the highest and not at the same time. This is a crucial point for anyone who can
differentiate a clear note from a dog bark and because chords are not usually played like this, unless you're a
superfast heavy metal guitar player, J. C. Bach or a 80s homecomputer-soundchip with only 3 channels available.
But in mainstream pop music? No chance.

The melody? Listen to AE's intro few times and then listen to DI with headphones on. It's all there, playing in
the background. The melody that Nelly sings is kind of a variation of the melody in AE's intro, but the original
melody is also there, in the background of DI! Here's another crucial point; they didn't remove the original melody, but
only lowered down it's volume and placed another melody (which Nelly sings) on top of it. I'd call this counterpoint,
if the the people behind DI wouldn't be such hacks. If you want to verify my claim about the melody, then don't pay
much attention to what Nelly is singing (or the drums) but everything else what is there; bassline,
"background-melody" and the arpeggiated chords.

There you have it. 16 bars of music, a whole verse, which became about 4 verses in the hands of another.

I can't discuss the legal issues here. Let's just say that Big Record Companies are surely the works of The Devil.
Spread the word...

-tempest

by tempestflt 21 hours ago
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I'll make one more remark and then I'm out:

"First of all you have to prove that Timbaland heard your track before he made his track. "

Acidjazzed Evening competed in Oldschool Music Compo at Assembly 2000 in Helsinki, infront of more than 4000 people (voters) and won the competition. There are good documents on this. You can of course believe that the whole event never took place, but would require heavy dose of self-deluding and not doing your research properly.

And no, I haven't given the copyrights of AE to anyone. Competing with a piece of music/graphics/whatever hardly ever involves giving up the copyright.

And for the one who talked about "similar chordprogression and bpm": did you read my post? There's 16
bars of melody aswell. Take 16 bars from any any memorable theme and see/hear what I mean...

"Why would he steal from you? He would lose credibility and cash."

You'll have to ask him. I know the whole things sounds very impropable... or does it really? Do we really know how often things like these happen? My song was easy to spot, because of the "C64ish" chipsounds I used, but what about songs that use "regular" instruments? And even if record companies pay compensation for the original composer they "borrow" from, they still might earn more from it than they lose. Loose-album has sold 2,5 million copies already and it's not just about the record sales, but also about touring, gaining loads of money by filling big arenas etc. Nelly Furtado is a product.

...and from what I see, Timbaland didn't lose cash but gained cash!

One more notice: I wouldn't recommend Gloom's video, atleast for "skeptics". He misses some key points there, uses bad set of examples - for example he even uses the later variation of the AE's intro's melody and not the actual intromelody. That's why he has to cut it off quicky, because the end of the melody is a bit different from the one that got sampled in DI. I do have to admit that the final demonstration in the video, with both songs played simultaniously, is charming =). The video might work as a good hint, but don't expect it to prove anything. Do your own research/listening. (There's a good set of mp3-examples as torrent, by some unknown individual.)

-tempest

Anyway, I am reasonably sure that if this guy started up a legal fund, I'd donate, and so would several others. This is poo poo.