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Posted by Metal Shop (Member # 354) on January 13, 2005, 08:44 PM:

I just watched a Chevy commercial that had a cover of "You Realy Got Me", with a lot of guitars. It rocked, but no more than the VH/Punks version.

If you have a song, that was great in its original "mellow" version, and awesome in its classic "metal" version, why the hell would you cover it again in the same metal version?

Posted by Tracy (Member # 247) on January 15, 2005, 05:50 AM:

Likely what happened was that Chevy has to pay royalties to use the song. In the classic version, those go to Ray Davies of The Kinks who wrote it. If they used the Van Halen version, they'd have to pay VH for using their recorded version too. It's probably a lot cheaper to pay some studio guys in L.A. to quickly record a Van Halen-like version and just pay the studio guys scale.

I think the original was made in '64 or '66, and copyrights become public domain after 2 17-year periods, 34 years in all. It's been longer than that, so Chevy may have not had to pay anybody.

=^,,^=

Posted by RacerXWebguy (Member # 220) on January 17, 2005, 03:56 PM:

Not sure about the 34 years. That wouldn't explain why Led Zeppelin had to approve Rock 'N' Roll for Cadillac.

I remember Sammy Hagar talking about this when Right Now was used by Pepsi. He said if you hear the REAL artist playing the song, then the artist is getting paid. If the artist doesn't own their own catalog (most don't), and you hear the song with different musicians...then the artist refused, but the record company who owns the catalog said yes, and is getting paid. So he said when Pepsi asked if they could use Right Now, Sammy said...So...do we say no and the record company gets paid....or do we say yes, and we get paid. Didn't take much thought.