Did you know???
AOL Time Warner owns the copyright of “Happy Birthday To You” and will continue to do so until 2030 when the copyright expires. This is the reason movies most often use different songs for birthday scenes. AOL Time Warner earns over $2 million per year from royalties for the song.
Pretty sick right?
I am unsure about this one but rumor has it that the Aerosmith song "Dude Looks Like A Lady" was inspired by Vince Neil, of Motley Crue.
DJ Casper, the creator of the song "Cha Cha Slide," has filed a lawsuit against several parties.
According to the lawsuit filed December 31, he entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with M.O.B. Records in 2000. Songwriter Jerome Haywood has been named in the suit as the man who helped Casper fill out the copyright forms for the song. He feels that both Haywood and M.O.B. has cheated him out of royalties by taking the copyright and licensing for themselves and designating his composition as a “work for hire” project.
Casper goes on in the lawsuit stating that "royalties were never paid and [the] Plaintiff (DJ Casper) never received any accounting statements despite demands, and even as the song became very popular and, on information and belief, Defendant M.O.B. sold over 500,000 copies.”
He also believes that the parties obtained their own copyrights in order to take complete ownership of the hit 2003 record.
In 2007, the song was prominently used by McDonalds for a national Happy Meal commercial. It reached No. 1 on Billboard’s U.S. and UK charts.
