Thursday's Thoughts

Only one topic this week but it's something that hits close to home for me specifically.
Read more after the jump.

Well, I'd first of all like'to say that I'm a huge fan of Swedish House Mafia, and I always will be, but I just lost a ton of respect for Axwell and Sebastain Ingrosso. If you didn't see the twitter conversation then I'll sum it up for ya. Hardwell released some bootlegs on Facebook last week with a few samples from Ingrosso's and Axwell's tracks in them. Ingrosso accused Hardwell of posting others' music in exchange for a few likes. While Hardwell handled the situation well and agreed to take them down, a lot of questions are now being directed towards two thirds of the Swedish House Mafia.

If the two are really flipping out over a mashup with a few samples of their tracks then I have a big problem here and I'm not the only one. Other artists quickly took to Twitter to voice their opinions such as Kaskade. Ironically and unfortuneately, at around the same time all this was happening, Kap Slap's SoundCloud page got taken down for copyright infringment which is so uncomprihensably shitty. While Kap Slap's page has been under some serious heat for copyright infringement for a few weeks now, it still sucks.

Be sure to go and hit follow on his new SoundCloud page.

The way I see it, DJing at it's very core and birth was built on the foundation of taking two songs and mixing them together using turn tables. Typically this involved an acapella of one track and an instrumental of another. Now clearly since then the production process has come a very long way but the mashups and bootlegs still play a huge part in the begining of a DJ's career. For one, mashups and bootlegs are the number one way for new names to become recognised. For example, 3LAU started out making mashups, and as he was discovered and developped a fan base, he moved onto doing remixes and is soon set to release some of his original tracks. Personally I don't see what the problem with mashups are, as long as the DJ making them isn't selling the mashups, all they're doing is playing the music of fellow artists, spreading the music and doing them a favour, which is the whole prospect of DJing, almost no DJ plays only his own tunes in his set, he always plays tracks from others! My point is that if Ingrosso and Axwell want to be assholes and cry about their tracks being featured in a mashup or two, let them go ahead, even though the mashups generated no profit for Hardwell and actually shared some of their stuff, which could potentially expand their fan base, whatever. At the end of the day it's only their loss and it only makes them look like the bad guys.