I’ve been to a karaoke or two in my time, and sometimes, if it’s a song i know well, i have noticed a variance in the lyrics.
eg. Spandau Ballet ‘Gold’
Original Lyrics
“These are my salad days,
Slowly being eaten away”
Karaoke version
“These are my silent days,
Slowly then I turn away”
or my favourite example
Richard Marx ‘Hazard’
Original Lyrics
“Even then the folks in town said with prejudiced eyes,
that boy’s not right”
Karaoke veriosn
“Even then the folks in town said the prettiest eyes
that boy’s not right”.
I had always assumed that whomevers job it was to transcribe the lyrics had made a mess of it. But when I voiced this theory to the karaoke dj, they told me that All the karaoke songs have this form of error in them somewhere, it’s to do with copyrighting.
So my question is in two parts.
Firstly, do all karaoke songs have a purposeful lyric error in them to protect the distributors being legally accosted by the song owner.
Secondly, does changing a line or two whilst leaving all other lyrics the same, not to mention the music, really change the song to such an extent that it is a ‘new’ song and not applicable as far as copyright goes?
I’ve never noticed any songs at karaoke with incorrect lyrics. Reputable karaoke outfits pay copyright fees to the big music rights clearinghouse(s). Disreputable ones may try things like this, but I can’t see how they’d have any chance at all in prevailing in a copyright dispute.
If there are lyrics mistakes like this, they are either there for another reason or there are incredibly naive people making useless changes in the hopes that means they can’t get fined.
I’m guessing that it’s just “Engrish” errors. Most karaoke machines (and CDs, as I understand it) are made in Asia. I used to collect a lot of records when I was a teenager and every Japanese record I’ve ever owned came with a lyric sheet. Because after all, all of the music was in English and most Japanese don’t speak English well enough to understand it in a song. Errors on the lyric sheets were ** quite common**. Here’s two I can remember:
Duran Duran - Fame (Bowie cover, B-side of the “Careless Memories” single)
Japanese lyrics: “Got to get to Wichita”
Actual lyrics: “Got to get a rain check on pain”
Duran Duran - Is There Something I Should Know?
Japanese lyrics: “There’s a dream let’s dream it’s the road.”
Actual lyrics: “There’s a dream that strings the road.”
So, it’s my guess that your DJ friend if full of it. Every if they got some of the lyrics wrong, it wouldn’t get them out of a copyright suit if they didn’t pay their ASCAP (or related) fees.
It’s my understanding that the transcriptions are often done by English-speaking foreigners living in Japan, but this is obviously no guarantee of lyrical accuracy. I’ve misheard the lyrics to songs on the radio often enough that I’m sure I’d make mistakes were it my job to transcribe song lyrics, and I’m a native English speaker.
Funnily enough, just yesterday one of my English conversation students wanted me to check some song lyrics he had printed off the Internet. They were for a song he’d tried to sing with his friend when they went out for karaoke. Both had been disappointed to see that the lyrics that appeared on the monitor were incorrect. Neither knew the song well enough to be sure of the right words though, so he turned to the Web for help. Maybe in the future more people will use the Internet to check song lyrics before they go out to the karaoke places.
This site is a pet peeve of mine. It may have started out with good intentions but has become a haven for people’s “creativity”. I’d wager that 75% of the stuff there was never “misheard” by anyone, but rather created deliberately by people for fun. This ruins the concept, for me anyway.
Somehow I doubt that changing one word is gonna save you from copyright lawyers, at least in the US: at the same time that the RIAA started going after peer-to-peer trading, they also had a side-project of reducing unauthorized MIDI songs on the internet. As a result, a lot of people who had MIDI files posted for download on their websites got notices from their ISP’s/the RIAA that providing such for download was copyright infringement, and to remove it. People on electronic music boards complained about this for a long time–you can still find a lot of MIDI’s online, but not nearly as many as you previously could.
~
Last night my husband and I were singing “Waterloo” on a friend’s karaoke machine, and the lyrics were just awful. The line that says “knowing my fate is to be with you” turned into “knowing my baby’s been meeting you.” (There was more, but that’s the only one I remember.)