Kid Cougars and Copyright
For those of you who have heard our song “It’s All in Your Head”, you are probably familiar with the “Explode, Ignite….” cheering/chants in the beginning and middle of the song. Chances are, however, you probably didn’t know who sang them, where they came from, or… (dramatic pause)… that they were technically obtained illegally.
But wait! Before you call up your copyright lawyer friend looking to sue us for the $50 we currently have in our account… WE HAVE GOOD NEWS! These samples have just been approved for use and we couldn’t be more excited about how the entire situation panned out!
So without further adieu, we give you… the talented Adams Elementary School Cougar Cheerleading Team from Castine, Maine!
Here’s the full story (as told by Brett):
While I was writing the song “It’s All in Your Head”, I kept feeling like the song was missing something. Spastic beat? Check. Dueling vocals? Check. Completely unnecessary “middle of nowhere sound” breakdown? Double check! The song needed something to add a little bit of fun to the recording. I could hear some sort of cheer in my head so I decided to search around the internet for inspiration to help me make my own cheer… (sounds logical right? yeaaahhhh)
I eventually stumbled onto the AES Cougar Cheerleading YouTube page. I was immediately intrigued by how unique the cheers sounded, chanted by children in a wide open gym and recorded with a lofi camcorder microphone. The fact that the cheers were being done by KIDS on a team named THE COUGARS was just icing on the cake… I HAD to use these samples!
When we originally wrote the song we imagined it would just be a fun little tune we shared with our friends and family. Accordingly, we didn’t worry about (ahem) “borrowing” the samples of the cheers without permission. Recently, however, with a heavy heart and some expert advice from our good lawyer buddy, Jason Swallow, we decided to make things right and try to get approval from the AES Cougar Cheerleaders.
I sent an email/plea for help to “Coach Jen” (Jennifer Henderson). She got back to me the same night saying she would forward the email to the school’s principal. This is where I started to stress out a little. Without their approval, I would have to re-record the samples in that song, take all of our music off the internet, and re-release a new version of that song and album. Not fun. It would be a lot of work but it was my own dang fault for going around taking samples from YouTube.
Fortunately, I woke up to find an incredibly nice email from Coach Jen and the AES Cougar Cheer Team the next morning. They liked our song and they let us use their samples! I guess the principal even played the music video for “It’s All in Your Head” at their school assembly the following day! Haha pretty neat.
In order to show our support and gratitude, we are sending them some money to buy the team a new tumbling mat. We are pretty excited we could help them out and that everything turned out so well… We can distribute the song “It’s All in Your Head” without fear, we got a neat little story to tell, we learned a ton about copyright law, and (best of all ) we also made some nice new friends up in Castine, Maine!
