…In which a group of Coulton fans and generally musically-inclined people work together to prove definitively that FOX used JoCo’s original track of Baby Got Back.

If you read my last post, you may have seen a single comment at the bottom by Mike from Geek Like Me, Too.  He kindly let me know that I was about a week behind the times: he, along with a handful of other people, had proved without a doubt that FOX used Coulton’s original track.  In fact, he has an entire blog post dedicated to how you too can hear the content theft!

His post also includes a basic summary of his findings.  Here’s a small excerpt:

What I believe we’ve shown — I say we, because other Jonathan Coulton fans have contributed their brains and ears — is that Glee used Coulton’s Karaoke track as a starting point, then center-cancelled it to get rid of the bass, and some of the percussion. Then they did some editing, to simplify the banjo parts a little bit, and to kill some of the more complicated bits of Coulton’s backing vocals, and mixed their new bass, drums, and vocals with it.

He goes into pretty specific detail throughout the rest of the post, talking about how he and others eliminated all the possibilities they could think of regarding how FOX might have obtained specific tracks or file types and used them.  In the end though, they determined that FOX clearly used sections of the original karaoke track

If you know anything about music or are just curious, you can find Mike’s final summary post of how he and others figured it all out here, and his original analysis of the infamous duck quack, can be found here.

Anyway, just wanted to keep everybody abreast of the situation…since I clearly wasn’t!

Don’t forget to snag Coulton’s re-release of the track from iTunes, Amazon, or Google Play, titled Baby Got Back (In the Style of Glee)!

Cover image from Wired.com