The Grey Album
March 5, 2008 – 8:35 pm
“The Grey Album” was released by DJ Danger Mouse in 2004. It used samples from the Beatles’ “White Album” and Jay-Z’s “Black Album”, and became quite a hit.
EMI, who own the rights to most of the Beatles’ music sent a cease-and-desist letter both to Danger Mouse and to stores that were selling the album.
This lead to a protest known as Grey Tuesday, where around 170 websites posted copies of the album on their sites for 24 hours as an act of protest. This led to more than 100,000 copies of the album being downloaded, totaling over a million individual tracks.
Some of the sites received cease-and-desist letters after that, but no charges were ever filed.
