I hardly know who this Steve Aoki guy is, an electro house producer and DJ, owning a label (Dim Mak Records) and a clothing line, and honestly I have never been interested by listening to anything he has done. Well, he mostly remixes stuff, from the Jackson 5 to Eminem, and this is probably very boring.
Recently, he has collaborated with Linkin Park for ‘The Light That Never Comes’, which I know, sounds super exciting,… you can watch the teaser below. But why would I be interested by such an insignificant thing? Just because their latest video demonstrates that Aoki is actually a cheap douchebag!
Smart people at Digital Music News closely analyzed the equipment used in the video and pointed out that ‘Team Arcade’ shows up at :23, and Team arcade, is a well-known software cracking group! So the guy uses a pirated synth to make his shitty song? Keep in mind that the legal version of the software called Sylenth costs €139 (about $186) and that Steve Aoki was recently ranked the tenth-richest DJ by Forbes, and earned about $14 million this past 12 months!!
Musicians complain about pirated music all the time and this ‘musician’ is pirating softwares when he could easily afford them?… what does it mean? It means that stealing over the internet is now the norm, and even rich people do it. I don’t want to insinuate that all musicians do it – and in any case DJs are not really musicians – but this isn’t a good sign.
The following day, Aoki responded to the accusation:
‘It’s recently come to my attention that some fans on Reddit caught a screenshot of a pirated software plug-in from a recent Youtube clip I did with Linkin Park. To clear the air, I have owned the properly registered plug-in, Sylenth, for over 4 years now on my studio computer. I’ve included both the receipt and a screenshot of the actual plug-in below, purchased by my faithful assistant Jacob Lee. This is the computer I do all of my production on, including “A Light That Never Comes” with Linkin Park.
However, the honest truth is that screenshot is in fact of my road laptop (the laptop I DJ with). I go through 5 or 6 of them a year, usually purchasing them while on the road. After my last purchase, I had asked my road team to help me load in my production software and apparently they didn’t ask Jacob for the authorization code for Sylenth and installed a pirated version.
So my apologies go out to the good people at Lennar Digital and a big thank you to my fans that caught the mistake which has since been rectified.
Sincerely,
Steve Aoki’
Yeah right, but why was this idiot using this specific pirated version in the video?