Lemonade - Madonna is lending

Lemonade - Madonna is lending her voice to anti-file-sharing efforts:

Warner Music Group had audio files purporting to be her new songs uploaded onto peer-to-peer file-sharing services. Anyone who downloaded the decoys, however, heard nothing but the pop star swearing at them.

But the file sharing world is apparently up to the challenge:

But since then, the pithy profanity has taken on a life of its own.

Some observers thought Madonna was smart to fight piracy with its own tools. Others perceived a thrown gauntlet -- hackers soon defaced Madonna's Web site with an equally profane retort along with several downloadable files of the then-unreleased songs. The defacement also carried a marriage proposal to Morgan Webb, an associate producer and on-air presenter at TechTV who had nothing to do with the prank.

A third group saw a creative opportunity. "What the f--- do you think you're doing," Madonna's now-infamous phrase, is turning up in dozens of remixes and the computer-aided musical collages known as cutups or mashups.

Independent music community DMusic is now hosting a competition for the best Madonna-based track, with the first prize being a "boycott-riaa (news - web sites)" T-shirt and stickers.

Wonderful.

Posted by Mitch at April 28, 2003 12:41 AM