An Aussie band who discovered that hit US sitcom How I Met Your Mother had used one of their songs without their permission has received what they call a ‘large’ payout from Fox who produce the show.
In fact, they’ve been paid out twice. Once for the first offence, an a second time because the song was used again in a later season because producers forgot to take it off a list of approved songs.
The saga all started when Tonk, a band from Canberra, started to get a flood of messages on their Facebook page from fans congratulating them after hearing the track on the popular TV show.
“We just kept getting all these messages on our Facebook page – people were saying ‘oh congratulations, heard you guys on How I Met Your Mother – that’s amazing’,” said drummer Tristan Davies in an interview with Triple J’s Hack program.
“We were trawling through all these episodes going ‘what the hell are they talking about’… eventually someone said season six episode six and sure enough it was our song, but not us,” he continued. “They’ve got the guitar tones pretty similar, the drum groove kind of similar.”
In a weird twist however the band discovered that while it was their song, it wasn’t them who was playing it. “Sure enough it was our song, but not us …,” Davies said in the interview. “They’ve got the guitar tones pretty similar, the drum groove kind of similar.”
Tonk spoke to an agent in the United States who markets their tracks for use in television and movies and discovered that their representatives had sent the song to Fox Broadcasting Company for a pitch to be used for How I Met Your Mother but hadn’t heard back.
“We got some confirmation from her that that particular song had been sent to the Fox network for that series,” Davies said. “So that gave us the pretty clear indication that they had heard the song, that it wasn’t just a coincidence.”
That’s when Tonk realised they could be headed for a major payday. “The exposure was great and we were blown away by the fact that they would even consider something that we’d done – some shithouse band in Canberra that no-one’s ever heard of. But we wondered how much push a such a small band could have against such a big television studio.”
The studio quickly admitted to the mistake and paid out a “large” amount of money – more than they would have received had Fox done the right thing to begin with according to Davies.
They also spoke to the musical supervisor of the show and tracked down who had made the cover of their song without permission. “Funnily enough he is a Berkeley graduate and has written countless soundtracks for movies like Napoleon Dynamite,” Davies explained.
“We wondered why he would even bother doing that rather than just paying the licensing fee and using the actual version of our track.”
