Credits Music

Shortly after starting season 3 of the show, Koop released and started using a credits theme song that was the brainchild of Josh and Koop. Almost a year prior, Josh and Koop had attended a showing of the classic anime, "Vampire Hunter D," at their local Alamo Drafthouse movie theater, as they had grown up on the movie and wanted to witness it on the big screen. At the end of the movie, the credits had begun to play, which the two had heard before, but had never really paid attention to the fact that the Japanese lyrics being sung were translated into English during the credits. Needless to say, the lyrics had very little to do with the movie in both context nor tone, and the juxtaposition of having just watched a bloody anime only to have it wrapped up by an up-beat love ballad lead to Josh giving the suggestion that the show could use a revamp (pun not intentional), suggesting that Koop take the song and translate the Japanese lyrics that were offered up in English into German. Koop loved the idea, and started work on the project. Although he took several years of German in high school, Koop ended up hiring someone to perform a legitimate translation from the English lyrics sheet into German. He also hired and paid for another person to recreate the background music. Once he had these pieces gathered, he proceeded to record himself singing the German lyrics. Finally, for that extra level of "class", Koop hired yet another person on Fiverr to master the music to make it sound more properly mixed. The end result was played from episode #302 up to #337 (although at some point there was a slip up and it was played an additional time, it is believed, after #337). Many people seemed to enjoy the credits music, but not everyone did. Primarily, Sony's European division did not appear to be a fan. Although the show was not monetized, the show was getting copyright strikes every week when this credits music was played as it triggered a flag on YouTube's side of things that declared that Koop's rendition of the song was "YOUR SONG (TWINKLE MIX)" and was being claimed as such by UMPG Publishing. As the first wave of these strikes appeared to be an automated process, Koop would have to dispute each of these initial claims by filling out a short form every week explaining how the copyrighted material the song was being flagged as should fall under fair use due to parody law, and that every element of Koop's rendition was created from scratch. Every week he would go through this process, and every week his first dispute would be denied. At that point, Koop had to fill out a secondary (and longer form) detailing further how his work should not be considered a copyright infringement, and issue an appeal, which Koop believes at that point actually would go in front of the publisher the strike was in reference to. That said, most of these appeals cleared after some time (although they'd usually take close to a month if memory serves correctly), however, eventually UMPG Publishing apparently got tired of receiving these appeals and began denying Koop his appeals. The options Koop was left with at this point was to either stop using the song, or go to physical court to defend his intellectual property. Given that the show was already on a shoestring budget already, the second option wasn't a feasible one, and starting with episode #338 "Goodbye Twinkle Mix" he had replaced the credits music with the royalty-free song "Young Traveler" by Harris Heller.

Click here to hear or download Koop's rendition of "Your Song" (in German and off-key)