It’s become a political tradition.
First, a campaign chooses to use a song for their rallies and/or videos and then the artist “asks” (you can’t put enough quotation marks around the work asks) them to take it down.
Former Congressman and Senate candidate Joe Sestak is the latest chapter in this likely never-ending story.
According to Andrew Kaczynski and Megan Apper of Buzzfeed, Sestak had to pull almost a dozen videos from his statewide walking tour that featured “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers aka the “I would walk 500 miles…” song.
“I requested permission to use the song “500 Miles” on YouTube via the record company, but also reached out to the band manager,” Sestak told BuzzFeed News in a statement. “This afternoon, the manager of the band replied and informed us that while we could continue our earlier efforts through Warner Chappel Music, that he was “sorry,”but he would eventually ‘decline any permission’ for the use in ‘political activities.’ I have since then removed the videos from our YouTube page to comply with this information.”
The Proclaimers manager told Buzzfeed that the group always turns down requests to use their music for any political purposes.
Presumably the Sestak campaigns will re-post the videos with different music as soon as possible.
4 Responses
David: if you could walk and think at the same time you could do us a favor and just go. Your hatred of the favorite candidate, Sestak is beyond ridiculous. I can name hundreds of people in Montgomery And Delaware are looking forward to having a Senator who speaks for us and works hard.
Also, the stories about Specter becoming a Democrat because the State Party and National Dems begged him is jus not true. He changed because , in his own words, he could not win a primary against Toomey as a Republican. So he switched . The party took out its anger at his losing the primary by denying funding or help of any kind to Sestak. So it was Dem Leadership who elected Toomey.
Any chance he can keep walking to Ohio? Enough of this guy already.
Even bands that only had one hit about 20 years ago don’t want to associate with Joe Sestak.
Now wait for that guy to jump in and tell us that the Proclaimers WOULD give permission to use their song to Josh Shapiro.
Beside the copyright issue, I had thought it odd that the was playing a song with 500 miles and walking only 422. Why not go to the full 500?