Illegal music

Overview

Illegal music is music which cannot be legally released, typically due to financial barriers to obtaining the necessary permissions from copyright holders.

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Such music is an issue for a number of reasons, including:

• Many people would like to legally obtain copies of it, thereby financially rewarding the (re)creators (and hopefully giving some additional reward to the creators of the source works as well)
• The creators of such works often do not find out about copyright conflicts until after they have already invested all the money and effort into producing the work in question; being unable to release the work, they are unable to recoup that investment
• Creators of such works may have to spend considerable amounts of money in court to defend themselves against even worse fines for copyright infringement, further depleting their financial resources

Works

• American Edit by "Dean Gray", an album of mashups of songs by neopunk artists Green Day with songs and material by other artists
• The Grey Album by Danger Mouse, an album of mashups derived from an a cappella version of rapper Jay-Z's The Black Album combined with instrumentals from The Beatles' album The Beatles (aka The White Album)
• "Kryptonite Werewolves of Alabama" by Woozalia, a mashup of "Werewolves of London", "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Jimmy Olsen's Blues"