There’s a few key rules that any emerging band needs to learn, and learn fast.
Respect your fans. Read the small print. And always, always pay the sound guy.
That’s the valuable lesson that a young Californian group learned the hard way after becoming a laughing stock in a viral YouTube hit.
An audio engineer and aspiring music producer was stiffed out of getting paid for his hard work by US amateur hardcore outfit, Altitudes, and illustrated that revenge is not a dish best served cold, but best served as an hilarious music video, remixing the young band’s hardcore tune into a supremely tacky, second-hand EDM banger and releasing it into the unforgiving plateau of the world wide web.
It’s unclear whether the teens were simply out of their bank account depth (or spent all their pocket money on skate gear and rollies), but Altitudes never wrote up a cheque for the desk jockey, who instead of taking legal action against he band provided more of his services for free by remixing what he’d already produced into an awful new dance remix.
As if putting the ‘brutal’ vocals front and centre, then decorating them with dotty keyboard lines and intentionally lame bass drops wasn’t humiliating enough, the soundtrack is paired with intercut footage of the band recording with some black and white shots of skateboarders tricking out in slo-mo and several intense close-ups of singer’s noticeable braces.
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According to the scorned producer – one Dan Atkinson of Long Beach, California studio Dan’s Lab – the cringeworthy dance remix was “the best 30 mins I’ve ever spent,”
“I recorded all the audio, filmed them at my studio, and then I decided to write a dance tune to the same tempo they recorded at. I merely took his vocals and slapped it on the dance track, then replaced the new audio to the video I had already edited,” explains Atkinson on his YouTube channel.
Altitudes singer Alexander Ruiz – he of the overly forced hardcore vocals and braced teeth – responded to the criticisms on the track and for not paying Atkinson. “It’s crazy seeing… our engineer do something like this to us,” he writes. “We never put the video out, we never put the song up for download or even share it. Basically we just weren’t financially stable at the time but we WERE planning on paying him back.”
Too little, too late it would seem, as Atkinson’s video had already gotten internet attention from popular US website Metal Sucks, while the fertile reddit community began tearing it to shreds as the video wound its way through the blogosphere.
Atkinson has since uploaded another video of his work with Altitudes “before the ‘You owe me money’ days,” further demonstrating the water-thin talent he was working with regardless.
The spurned engineer’s hardcore/EDM car-crash version may in fact be a slight improvement. In any case, Altitudes may have to grin and bear another hard-earned lesson in the wake of their unintended internet exposure: there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
