Has anyone heard a message in an industry-sabotaged mp3? What do they say?

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I remember thinking, soon after I first heard of Napster, that it would be pretty funny if someone downloaded a popular song, used their PC microphone to sing along with it starting around the second verse, mixed their voice (hopefully not quite in tune) back, not too loudly, into the song, and put it back up for sharing without changing the file name. I thought it would be a great surprise to hear, as most people probably wouldn't listen to the songs all the way through before burning a CD to hear while driving to work. I didn't hear of that happening, though, but I did hear of record-industry-sabotaged mp3s that contained an anti-file sharing message mixed in with the song*. Has anyone heard one of these? What does the message say, and is it always the same one? What kind of voice does the person have?

*(That completely ruins the joke - it would have to be sutble and resonate with a LOVE of music, where this would come at the music like a death threat.)

― tom (other one), Tuesday, 25 February 2003 00:24 (twenty-three years ago)

fremme neppa venette

― jess (dubplatestyle), Tuesday, 25 February 2003 00:28 (twenty-three years ago)

i downloaded what i thought was the whole of Common's new album, only to listen to it later and realize some jokester looped the intro and the chorus for the length of the actual songs and cut out any of the verses. pretty lame. stupid of me not to listen to a song whole before i downloaded the rest of the tracks.

― JasonD (JasonD), Tuesday, 25 February 2003 00:36 (twenty-three years ago)

pretty lame.

hardly. that's fucking brilliant!

― electric sound of jim (electricsound), Tuesday, 25 February 2003 00:38 (twenty-three years ago)

i downloaded RJD2's 'Dead Ringer' but all the tracks were littered with a sporadic vocoded message that went 'back again with my nizzle, promo bizzle for shizzle! and i swear by the grace of christ, a (floodgate?) is on the way...yadda yadda yadda' - as i said on another thread it was actually pretty cool and fitted well on some tracks (esp. 'Smoke & Mirrors') but i had to grab the 'official' recordings just to hear them without it

― stevem (blueski), Tuesday, 25 February 2003 00:54 (twenty-three years ago)

That's the Def Jux promobot, Steve. They do that for all the promos.

― mark p (Mark P), Tuesday, 25 February 2003 01:01 (twenty-three years ago)

Def Jux = BRILLIANT! I have to wonder about how much that costs, though, to remix, remaster and repress and album just to give 1000 or so copies away.

― Millar (Millar), Tuesday, 25 February 2003 01:26 (twenty-three years ago)

I got a catpower song last week that had someone meowing over it.

― David Beckhouse (David Beckhouse), Tuesday, 25 February 2003 01:42 (twenty-three years ago)

Yeah, my promo copy of the DJ Spinna album (which is in fact rather good) has loud second-long beeps about every minute or so throughout the whole album. Pretty annoying.

― CharlieNo4 (Charlie), Tuesday, 25 February 2003 01:43 (twenty-three years ago)

i got a video out the other day* and instead of previews there was somebody holding a yoda puppet up to their video camera and going "blockbuster video is AWESOME"

* actually two months ago

― Tracer Hand (tracerhand), Tuesday, 25 February 2003 02:17 (twenty-three years ago)

I downloaded the new 'Stripes record and it was just the first thirty seconds of each song repeated for the duration of the track.

― Mil, Tuesday, 25 February 2003 03:02 (twenty-three years ago)

I tried to download a sample from the new Bonnie Prince Billy album from Dragcity.com a while ago and was surprised to hear Neil Hamburger's commentary dubbed over it. I wish the link to this was still up, it was really quite funny.

― Famous Athlete, Tuesday, 25 February 2003 03:16 (twenty-three years ago)

Some of these sound okay, actually - the Neil Hamburger commentary and the promobot sound like versions that would be worth hearing in themselves - really, I was expecting a superimposed speech about how file-sharing was killing the musicians or something.

― tom (other one), Tuesday, 25 February 2003 03:22 (twenty-three years ago)

When Kid A first came out, the version of "Treefingers" had a message on it. You know, "treefingers" is pretty creepy anyway, and the voice was pitch-shifted way, way down, giving it a touch of evil. It said something like, "This voice is not included on the retail version." Or something. The voice was talking about itself. The cumulative effect was that it freaked me the fuck out first time I heard it, because I had burned the album already, and that was the only corrupted song on it, and I was way deep into a close headphones listen at the time. I about jumped out of my skin.

And then when I got a clean version of the song, I found I kinda missed the voice.

― Kenan Hebert (kenan), Tuesday, 25 February 2003 04:32 (twenty-three years ago)

it would be pretty funny if someone downloaded a popular song, used their PC microphone to sing along with it starting around the second verse, mixed their voice (hopefully not quite in tune) back, not too loudly, into the song, and put it back up for sharing without changing the file name.

Not *precisely* what you're talking about, but extremely fucking funny nonetheless:

http://www.savsings.com/

― CharlieNo4 (Charlie), Wednesday, 26 February 2003 03:48 (twenty-three years ago)

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