Via Boing! Boing! it appears that activists have set up GreyTuesday.Org to encourage people to mirror The Grey Album on February 24.
The Grey Album is a mix album making the rounds that takes the vocals from Jay-Z’s The Black Album and mixes it with samples from the Beatles’ White Album.
Rolling Stone called The Grey Album “an ingenious hip-hop record that sounds oddly ahead of its time” and the Boston Globe said it was the “most creatively captivating” album of the year.”
Okay, I will grant that it does make Jay-Z (barely) listenable for more than a few minutes at a time, though a couple run throughs on the CD player was all I needed.
Anyway, the Grey Tuesday folks apparently are upset that there’s no compulsory licensing system for samples of music. So if you want to re-record a Beatles tune you can, you just have to pay a set fee to do so. If you want to sample a Beatles tune, you have to pretty much beg the Beatles’ record company to do so, and they’re going to say no regardless of how much money you offer them.